Abstract
Content published on social media may affect user’s attitudes toward wildlife species. We evaluated viewers’ responses to videos published on a popular social medium, focusing particularly on how the content was framed (i.e., the way an issue is conveyed to transmit a certain meaning). We analyzed videos posted on YouTube that showed vultures interacting with livestock. The videos were negatively or positively framed, and we evaluated viewers’ opinions of these birds through the comments posted. We also analyzed negatively framed videos of mammalian predators interacting with livestock, to evaluate whether comments on this content were similar to those on vultures. We found that the framing of the information influenced the tone of the comments. Videos showing farmers talking about their livestock losses were more likely to provoke negative comments than videos not including farmer testimonies. The probability of negative comments being posted on videos about vultures was higher than for mammalian predators. Finally, negatively framed videos on vultures had more views over time than positive ones. Our results call for caution in the presentation of wildlife species online, and highlight the need for regulations to prevent the spread of misinformed videos that could magnify existing human-wildlife conflicts.
Highlights
Content published on social media may affect user’s attitudes toward wildlife species
Depending on the video framing and the species involved, the videos analyzed received different percentages of empathetic comments, consonant-dissonant comments and comments proposing lethal-nonlethal strategies to deal with the species involved (Fig. 1A–C, Supplementary Table S2)
More empathetic comments were posted for mammalian predators than for vultures when they were both shown in negatively framed videos (Fig. 1A)
Summary
Content published on social media may affect user’s attitudes toward wildlife species. Data shared on these platforms and other social media may provide information on cultural ecosystem s ervices[9,10,11], the preferences of tourists for observation of biodiversity, activities carried out in protected a reas[12], and the emotions these sites p rovoke[13] These data can be used to evaluate illegal activities, such as hunting[7], and to analyze people’s tolerance and perceptions of wildlife s pecies[14,15]. In many cases, posted content is based on biased information without strong scientific evidence, or may even be fake news or illegal information (e.g., wildlife trading)[17,18] This scenario can become more serious for wildlife conservation when these messages “go viral”[18,19] or are presented with misleading “frames” (a frame refers to the way an issue is described or how a problem is conceived and approached so that it conveys a certain meaning)[20].
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