Biodiversity Exploitation for Online Entertainment

Rassim Khelifa,Nur Hasanah,Hayat Mahdjoub,Claire Kremen,Mohammed Khalil Mellal

doi:10.3389/fcosc.2021.788269

Abstract

Anthropogenic wildlife exploitation threatens biodiversity worldwide. With the emergence of online trading which facilitates the physical movement of wildlife across countries and continents, wildlife conservation is more challenging than ever. One form of wildlife exploitation involves no physical movement of organisms, presenting new challenges. It consists of hunting and fishing “experiments” for monetized online entertainment. Here we analyze &gt;200 online videos of these so-called experiments in the world's largest video platform (YouTube). These videos generated about half a billion views between 2019 and 2020. The number of target species (including threatened animals), videos, and views increased rapidly during this period. The material used in these experiments raises serious ethical questions about animal welfare and the normalization of violence to animals on the Internet. The emergence of this phenomenon highlights the need for online restriction of this type of content to limit the spread of animal cruelty and the damage to global biodiversity. It also sheds light on some conservation gaps in the virtual sphere of the Internet which offers biodiversity-related business models that has the potential to spread globally.

Highlights

Biodiversity is threatened by anthropogenic factors worldwide (Johnson et al, 2017; Arneth et al, 2020; Tickner et al, 2020)
The Internet has created a new landscape of online illegal trading which amplifies the outreach, facilitates the trading process, and increases transactions nationally and internationally (Sung and Fong, 2018; Wong et al, 2020)
Due to the rapid evolution of the Internet, wildlife conservation needs to be in a constant arms race to combat new emerging online-based threats

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Biodiversity is threatened by anthropogenic factors worldwide (Johnson et al, 2017; Arneth et al, 2020; Tickner et al, 2020). These “experiments” have become popular on the Internet, on YouTube, affecting both a diverse array of taxa and their habitats These practices both raise serious ethical questions about normalizing violence to animals and spreading content harmful to animal welfare and present a new complex challenge for wildlife conservation. We determine whether the current YouTube surveillance mechanisms (including algorithm) are effective in removing HFE content by checking the status of the video 7 months after our initial investigation To our knowledge, this phenomenon is relatively new, and the current contribution sheds light on some conservation gaps that necessitate the establishment of effective policies for regulating threats to biodiversity currently marketed as online entertainment

Background About HFE

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT