Understanding Perceptions and Attitudes toward Genetically Modified Organisms on Twitter

Social media platforms, especially Twitter, provide an abundance of information to study public perceptions and trends on a wide range of social topics. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their uptake continuously generate controversial discussions among consumers, producers, and policymakers. Although several studies have analyzed public perceptions and attitudes toward GMOs, little is known about on how laypeople's opinions and GMO-related information posted by organizations are different on Twitter. In this study, we prospectively and retrospectively collected GMO-related Twitter data, developed text classifiers to filter out irrelevant tweets, and categorized relevant tweets into organizational entities and laypeople. We also explored discussion themes by using topic modeling, and used sentiment analysis to access laypeople's attitudes to answer three research questions (RQs), namely: RQ1) What are the most discussed topics in GMO-related tweets among laypeople as compared to those posted by organizational entities? RQ2) How have the discussion topics in GMO-related tweets changed in the US over time among laypeople and organizational entities? and RQ3) What are the sentiments associated with GMO-related tweets among laypeople?