Social perceptions going online: Exploring the impact of social media food content exposure on perceptions of food norms

Social media is becoming an increasingly important environment for food-related content, however, the question of whether the food content encountered on social media contributes to the perception of food-related social norms is relatively unexplored. In the present study, we addressed this question by testing whether exposure to unhealthy food content on YouTube is related to how people perceive social norms regarding (un)healthy food consumption. Furthermore, we investigated the boundary conditions for the hypothetical link between the exposure and the norm perceptions, focusing on the type of content (i.e., ads vs. user-generated content) and individual characteristics (i.e., algorithmic media content awareness). We applied a data donation approach to collect YouTube data on users' exposure to food-related content and combined this with a survey. With the data from 102 respondents, no significant association between unhealthy food content exposure (i.e., frequency and proportion) and perceived unhealthy food norms was found. Explorative analyses revealed, however, a significant negative association between unhealthy food content exposure (i.e., frequency) and perceived healthy food norms, and this association was more pronounced when individuals encountered more user-generated food content (vs. food ads). Interestingly, this pattern emerged only for injunctive norms but not for descriptive norms. Despite these results offering limited support for the presumed link between exposure to unhealthy food content and food norm perceptions, the findings provide input for future studies in this area. Limitations of the present study and implications of employing a data donation approach for exploring social media data are discussed.