I made a couple of polls recently in r/vegan, as I was interested to get an idea of how many people went vegan from Reddit or similar online comments.

Poll 1: "Did online comments/debates influence your decision to go vegan?" https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/s/Q7HWQpPPsy

Results: N=195 (N=180 vegans) Yes (Reddit): 29 Yes (non Reddit): 33 Partially: 22* No: 96* Not (yet) vegan: 15

So 47% of Reddit vegans in the poll were at least partially influenced by online comments/debates (16% Reddit, 18% non-Reddit, 12% partially)

*NOTE I originally voted wrong, so have added 1 to "Partially" and removed 1 from "No" - forgot that I did see a Reddit comment that influenced me

Poll 2: "Did street activism influence your decision to go vegan?" https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/s/l3jv2g0H04

Results: N=152 (all presumably vegan) Yes: 10 Partially: 20 No: 122

And 20% of Reddit vegans in this poll were at least partially influenced by street activism.

So it would seem that at least for Redditors, online comments can have a substantial impact on their decision to go vegan - and I'm sure that well formed, context-relevant arguments with good sources would do even better. Though I welcome anyone with better stats knowledge than me to critique the poll and how generalisable it is.

This seems to align with a Faunalytics study that found news articles and social media posts are some of the most effective forms of activism, and that showing graphic videos to strangers could have an anger-inducing backlash effect (though not saying this form of activism hasn't worked for many people - it clearly has):

Planting Seeds: The Impact Of Diet & Different Animal Advocacy Tactics

https://faunalytics.org/relative-effectiveness/

We recommend social media posts because, like news articles, they also reduced meat-avoiders’ self-reported animal product consumption, while not negatively impacting meat-eaters’ behaviors in our experiment. Similarly, in our first study, social media posts were reported as reducing animal product consumption by almost 40% of respondents who remembered experiencing them.

While this could be specific to our particular examples, we suggest that advocates and organizations make sure it’s clear how people can change their behavior when creating social media posts. This is especially important considering that the clearer people found animal advocacy regarding behavior change, the more likely they were to sign a petition.

Thus, the effectiveness of social media posts (and other advocacy forms) may be strengthened by adding more explicit guidance or recommendations on behavior change—as long as it’s handled in a way that doesn’t make it, for example, more angering or condescending.

Although we did not test this directly for ethical reasons, we also recommend that advocates show graphic videos only to forewarned viewers, as it is reasonable to assume that anger would be higher in individuals who find the content objectionable (rightly or wrongly) and did not consent to see it. Indeed, graphic videos scored the highest for anger towards advocates in our experiment and they also caused an above-average level of anger in 27% of respondents in our first study, on top of being described by some people as turning them away from learning about animal suffering. It is worth noting that all our participants were aware that they would see graphic content and gave consent.

Happy to hear any thoughts about how we can most effectively create a vegan world!