Disclosure: this article was written by the head of research at Viva!, a vegan campaigning group. foodfacts.org's founder, Robbie Lockie, also founded the Freedom Food Alliance, whose report is discussed below.

The evidence does not show that bots are the main force behind online hostility to vegan diets. The best-documented case, the backlash to the 2019 EAT-Lancet report, points instead to a small network of influential human accounts, some with links to the meat and dairy industry. An analysis commissioned by Changing Markets Foundation found that just 100 accounts produced nearly half of the backlash posts on Twitter and more than 90 per cent of the engagement, and that none of them appeared to be bots.[7] A peer-reviewed analysis published in The Lancet reached the same conclusion about automation.[8]

Whenever a vegan enters online conversations, a familiar pattern can emerge. Whether it’s a post about the health benefits of beans, a recipe for a lentil soup, concerns about red and processed meat, a comment on the environmental footprint of dairy or an exposé on factory farming, all can attract a wave of hostile comments. Nutrition claims are challenged, advocates are mocked and discussions about scientific evidence can quickly descend into arguments. As the head of research at vegan campaigning group Viva!, on a number of occasions I have asked people to provide evidence for their outlandish claims and been sent a link to a YouTube video from one influencer or another.

People have legitimate questions about nutrition, they may disagree about dietary choices, and we all deserve space to debate evidence. But what happens when online hostility is amplified by organised campaigns, commercial interests or influential accounts spreading misinformation? Is the backlash organic, automated or coordinated, and how can we tell the difference?

What the research says about online hostility to vegan diets

Social media makes it easy for two kinds of false information to spread quickly: misinformation, which is false or inaccurate information shared by people who may believe it to be true, and disinformation, which is deliberately created or shared to mislead.[12]

Research specifically examining online opposition to plant-based diets is limited, but several studies provide useful starting points. A 2025 systematic review of 28 studies on nutrition misinformation on social networks found that Instagram and YouTube were the platforms most often studied (in 50 per cent and 39 per cent of the studies respectively), and that more than 62 per cent of the studies addressed misinformation about ‘miracle diets’.[11]

Another study, analysing more than 1.2 million English-language tweets about healthy diets over 16 months, found that the discussion was dominated by people who were not health professionals. It also found widespread use of bots that polluted the discussion and sought to create a false equivalence between diets and nutritional strategies, potentially making poorly supported approaches appear as credible as those based on evidence. Notably, much of the bot and spam activity it identified was linked to low-carb and keto content rather than to attacks on vegan diets.[9] Bots are present in diet discourse, then, but the strongest vegan-specific evidence, from the backlash to the EAT-Lancet report, points to influential human accounts rather than automation.[7, 8]

Person in a green headscarf scrolling food posts on a phone on a hillside, beside a bamboo lunch box of chickpea salad, a small toy robot and a steel flask
Bots do appear in online diet discussions, but research has not shown that they drive the backlash against vegan diets. Illustration: foodfacts.org

Bots, coordinated accounts and suspicious behaviour

Researchers look for patterns that may suggest inauthentic or coordinated activity, such as unusually repetitive posting, near-identical wording, synchronised timing, clusters of accounts sharing the same links, repeated mutual tagging and disproportionate engagement from a small group. These patterns are clues rather than proof: real people can post similarly, use shared hashtags or amplify one another, while automation can also have legitimate uses.

More detailed evidence comes from ‘social-listening’ research. Changing Markets Foundation’s Truth, Lies and Culture Wars report analysed more than 285 million posts, mostly on X, from June 2022 to July 2023, identifying roughly 948,000 conversations classified as containing misinformation about meat, dairy, alternatives or climate science. Of these, 78 per cent attacked alternatives to meat and dairy, including vegan diets, while 22 per cent promoted meat and dairy products or their perceived benefits.[6] The report noted that bots were among the high-volume accounts posting this content, but did not put a number on them.[6]

The analysis also found that engagement was highly concentrated: just 50 accounts generated around half of all engagement across a dataset of roughly 425,000 accounts. That does not mean every account was part of a centrally directed industry campaign. The report said that establishing whether companies directly orchestrated the conversations was outside its scope. It linked narratives promoting meat and dairy directly to the industry, but said that culture-war and conspiracy content, often far-right in origin, could not be directly linked to it, even though the two agendas overlap.[6]

The 2019 EAT-Lancet report set out a ‘planetary health diet’: largely plant-based, with far less red meat than many people in wealthy countries eat today (see also our coverage of the new EAT-Lancet report). The reaction was intense. The report’s authors faced personal threats and abuse, thousands of critical posts appeared on Twitter (now X), and more than 500 articles attacking the report were published.[4]

A peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet, covering 4,278 Twitter users and 8.5 million tweets, found that a #yes2meat countermovement began organising about a week before the report’s launch on 17 January 2019. Its posts were around ten times more likely to be negative about the report than positive or neutral. On the question of bots, the authors were clear: the spread was “not driven by automatically produced content through so-called social bots”, but by a growing community of sceptical users.[8] (One author was then deputy director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a scientific partner of the EAT Foundation.)

In 2025, a leaked document seen by the climate news site DeSmog suggested that the PR firm Red Flag, working on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, had helped to fuel the backlash. According to DeSmog, the Alliance is a meat and dairy industry coalition set up to protect the sector against ‘emerging threats’, and its board includes representatives of Cargill and Smithfield Foods, two of the world’s largest meat companies. Neither Red Flag nor the Alliance responded to DeSmog’s requests for comment, and neither DeSmog nor the Guardian suggested that Red Flag was involved in the personal attacks on the report’s authors.[3, 4]

Changing Markets Foundation’s 2025 report, Meat vs EAT-Lancet, goes further. Drawing on social-media analysis, leaked material and documents obtained through freedom of information requests (many of them first obtained by Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed), it maps what it describes as a network of industry-friendly scientists, carnivore-diet doctors, health influencers and pro-meat journalists and authors. It places Shawn Baker, Nina Teicholz, Ken Berry, Frédéric Leroy and Frank Mitloehner among 33 accounts that it says appeared to act as a coordinated network, and calls them ‘mis-influencers’. These are the report’s characterisations. Of the five, it describes only Mitloehner’s research centre, the CLEAR Center at UC Davis, as industry-funded. It characterises Baker, Berry and Teicholz by their promotion of carnivore, paleo or keto diets, and notes that Teicholz says she has no commercial or industry ties.[7]

The same report says Red Flag appears to have helped the Animal Agriculture Alliance undermine the EAT-Lancet launch. But it also states plainly that none of the top 100 accounts appeared to be bots or fake accounts: they were real, and very committed, people.[7]

The EAT-Lancet backlash therefore points to coordinated human amplification rather than automated manipulation. Even so, it appears to have worked as a concerted effort to discredit the researchers and their work.

The personal cost was real. Dr Marco Springmann, one of the report’s authors, then a senior researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and a professorial research fellow at UCL’s Institute for Global Health, told the Guardian that a year of hostile coverage left him burnt out: “Usually I lead on two to three studies a year, but in the year following Eat-Lancet, I wasn’t able to even lead on one.”[4]

Who shapes the narrative and why?

An industry-funded campaign, an ideological influencer, a genuine sceptic and an anonymous troll can all produce similar-looking online hostility. The meat and dairy industries clearly have commercial reasons to engage in debates about meat, dairy and dietary guidance, and several investigations have set out how that engagement works.

A 2024 report for the Freedom Food Alliance, Harvesting Denial, Distractions & Deception, by environmental scientist Nicholas Carter, catalogues the tactics it says the animal agriculture industry and its allies use to slow the shift towards plant-based food. It groups them into strategies to deny, derail, delay, deflect and distract, alongside the industry presenting itself as the victim. Its examples range from the #Yes2Meat response to EAT-Lancet to industry funding of academics and experts, and campaigns by the Center for Consumer Freedom portraying plant-based foods as unhealthy and ultra-processed.[5]

On bots, the report describes how astroturfing, creating a false impression of grassroots support, has moved online, where software can run large numbers of fake or pseudonymous accounts, some operated by people and some by automated ‘social bots’. It treats bots as one tool among many, alongside influencers, front groups, paid experts and placed media stories. It argues that this mix helps to manufacture a false sense of balanced debate, which it calls ‘bothsidesism’, when the science points clearly towards eating more plants and fewer animal-sourced foods.[5] The report was funded by a small grant from the Jeremy Coller Foundation and the Freedom Food Alliance.

Reporting on Changing Markets’ 2023 analysis, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) showed that misleading claims are not confined to anonymous accounts. One example was a May 2023 post by Donald Trump Jr to his roughly 10 million followers calling for a ban on ‘fake meat’, citing a study, not peer reviewed, that claimed lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more CO2. The BIJ also described how messaging against eating less meat overlaps with climate denial, conspiracy theories about ‘elites’ and culture-war framing that casts dietary advice as an attack on personal freedom.[10] Examples like these show how a small number of influential accounts can give misleading narratives outsized visibility.

A 2026 narrative review found that common nutrition myths, such as claims about detox diets and the benefits of coloured salts, often lack robust scientific evidence, and that they are amplified by social media, confirmation bias and commercial interests. The authors conclude that stronger nutrition education and evidence-based communication are needed to counter misinformation and support informed dietary choices.[2]

Social media is a major battleground for dietary misinformation, with a high volume of misleading posts either overstating the necessity of meat or disparaging plant-based alternatives.[6]

Person scrolling food posts on a phone at a kitchen counter beside a raw steak, a bowl of lentils and a block of tofu, while a row of phones on the shelf all show the same burger image
A small number of accounts can make one message look as if it is everywhere. Illustration: foodfacts.org

How much of the backlash is coordinated?

Despite evidence of concentrated engagement in some cases, the overall scale of coordinated activity remains difficult to quantify. Changing Markets Foundation’s investigation into the EAT-Lancet backlash found that 100 influential accounts, which it calls mis-influencers, produced nearly half of the backlash posts on Twitter between June 2018 and April 2019, and more than 90 per cent of the engagement. Within this group it identified 33 accounts that appeared to form a coordinated network: they consistently tagged and shared one another’s content, using similar or identical wording and hashtags. The analysis was carried out for Changing Markets by Ripple Research and has not been peer reviewed.[7]

Online visibility does not necessarily translate into real-world influence: hostile comments may make opposition appear widespread, but engagement metrics alone cannot establish whether a coordinated backlash changes people’s beliefs or dietary choices. That said, it is a legitimate concern that online mis-influencers may discourage people from adopting healthier, more sustainable plant-based diets, with potential consequences for both individual and public health.

An adult holding a phone filled with identical message bubbles while a child takes carrot sticks, beside a salad bowl and rows of identical toy robots on a kitchen counter
There is no reliable estimate of how much online criticism of plant-based diets is automated or coordinated. Illustration: foodfacts.org

Is the backlash against vegans organised? What we can conclude

The evidence does not support the simple claim that opposition to plant-based diets is driven by bots. But it does suggest that the online backlash is not simply a spontaneous expression of widespread public opinion. We do not need research to tell us that nutrition misinformation is common on social media;[11] what the research reveals is that large volumes of misleading posts about meat, dairy and vegan diets are associated with highly concentrated engagement and a small number of influential accounts shaping what audiences see.[6, 7]

The strongest evidence of organisation comes from the backlash to the EAT-Lancet report: a network of mis-influencers, apparent coordination among 33 accounts and links between some narratives and industry-aligned organisations, including the Animal Agriculture Alliance and PR firm Red Flag.[3, 7] Both the Changing Markets analysis and an independent peer-reviewed study found that this backlash was driven by people, not bots.[7, 8]

What remains uncertain is the overall scale. There is no reliable estimate of what proportion of criticism of plant-based diets is bot-driven, commercially motivated or coordinated across platforms. Nor can engagement metrics alone show whether these campaigns change beliefs or eating habits. What can be said is that misleading narratives about meat, dairy and plant-based foods are amplified by influential voices, that industry interests have commercial reasons to shape these debates, and that coordinated amplification can make minority viewpoints appear far more dominant than they really are.

While questions about nutrition, cost and accessibility deserve serious consideration, at least some of the most visible online opposition to veganism and meat reduction, notably the backlash to the EAT-Lancet report, appears to have been strategically amplified. Readers should distinguish evidence-based discussion from misinformation, harassment and attempts to discredit the science. A better food debate means demanding transparent sources and scrutinising who benefits when plant-based eating is made to look extreme, unhealthy or socially unacceptable.

The value of a plant-based diet should be judged on the strength of the scientific evidence, not the volume of online hostility. Discussions about vegan diets should be grounded in peer-reviewed research and address nutrients, accessibility and individual needs, not rely on misleading claims, harassment or coordinated amplification. Public debate is strongest when it focuses on what the science shows: according to the British Dietetic Association, well-planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life stage,[1] and they offer substantial environmental benefits.

Read the full reports

Three of the reports behind this article are available to read in full in the foodfacts.org reports library:

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Frequently asked questions about bots and the online backlash against vegans

Are bots behind the online backlash against vegans?

There is no evidence that bots are the main driver. Bots do appear in online diet discussions, but the best-studied case, the backlash to the 2019 EAT-Lancet report, was driven by real people: both a peer-reviewed study and an analysis for Changing Markets Foundation found no sign that the most influential accounts were bots.

Who was behind the backlash to the EAT-Lancet report?

Analyses point to a small network of influential accounts, including pro-meat scientists, doctors, influencers and authors. A leaked document reported by DeSmog suggests the PR firm Red Flag, working for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, helped to fuel the backlash.

How can you tell if an online campaign is coordinated?

Researchers look for clusters of accounts posting near-identical wording, sharing the same links, tagging one another repeatedly or posting at the same times, and for engagement concentrated in a few accounts. These are clues rather than proof, because real people can also post in similar ways.