Online Activism: 5 Minutes 5 Vegans
Lots of vegans want to promote the cause but don’t know where to start. That’s what 5 Minutes 5 Vegans aims to solve, by quickly and effectively answering questions from the vegan-curious.
5 Minutes 5 Vegans is a web-based tool that uses Twitter bots to scan and display posts from individuals looking for help with making the vegan switch. The site provides responses to the most common vegan questions and fallacies. Users can select and edit these responses to reply to a potential vegan’s tweet. In 5 minutes, you can motivate 5 vegan curious people to take the leap and adopt a vegan lifestyle.
Why Online Activism is Important
Social media has the power to influence potential vegans at a global scale. 5 Minutes 5 Vegans reaches people who are curious about the vegan lifestyle, but may not have any vegans around them to answer their questions. Whether you’re a veteran activist or a total amateur, 5 Minutes 5 Vegans encourages all vegans to get involved. The website is easy to navigate and incorporate into your daily online routine - it only takes 5 minutes after all.
In the middle of a global pandemic, it can be difficult to get involved with in-person activism. But, anyone with a device that connects to the internet can use 5 Minutes 5 Vegans, no social distancing is required. Physical gatherings may be on hold, but activism doesn’t have to be. The animals certainly can't wait.
Using 5 Minutes 5 Vegans
The feed of tweets from vegan-curious people our bots work hard to gather are displayed on the right. The left side contains a list of the most common vegan curious concerns, questions, and myths.
Go through the Twitter feed and decide on a tweet you want to respond to.
Awesome, you picked a tweet, now click on the prompt that best fits the subject matter of that tweet. This will display an answer to the prompt in the text box below.
Copy your selected prompt by clicking the icon in the bottom right hand corner of the text box.
Next, click directly on the tweet you want to reply to. This will open the tweet in a new tab, where you can paste your answer as a response to the tweet! We recommend that you edit the reply or add your own information to make the answer more relevant and prevent being flagged as spam.
In this example, the tweeter is talking about fried chicken. For my response, I chose to remove the original recommendation for Beyond Meat and leave just Gardein, as Gardein has breaded faux chicken products and Beyond Meat doesn’t (as of yet).
When using this tool, we also recommend to look at the replies and ensure others have not already responded with the same answer, this will also help prevent your tweet from being flagged as spam.
You can sign up for an account at the bottom left to create and save your own custom replies so you don’t always have to edit the pre-filled prompts. This makes your 5 minutes quicker and more effective, maybe you’ll even reach 6 or 7 potential vegans!
To Sum Up
There you have it, easy peasy online activism. If you are anything like me, you are probably connected to the internet for the majority of your day. It only takes 5 minutes out of that entire day to put a little more good into the world and help 5 people adopt a vegan lifestyle. Utilizing social media as a tool for vegan activism allows us to reach the most amount of people to accomplish our number one goal of liberating our animal friends. Now head over to 5minutes5vegans.org and help your first 5 people go vegan, we’ll see you there!
