The power of posting: how social media can influence wildlife conservation

A conceptual model to illustrate interactions between social media and wildlife conservation.

There are 4.48 billion social media users worldwide today, with users relatively evenly spread across genders, ages, and all continents.

Given its extensive volume and reach across large and diverse sociodemographic groups, social media has the potential to widely spread conservation messages and could be a powerful tool to mobilize social change to conserve biodiversity.

Conservation scientists are increasingly recognizing social media as a unique and large-scale source of data, as social media users generate real-time content and share information in the form of images, videos, and text, all of which can be used to support various conservation-focused research projects.

Read the open access paper on the FACETS website.

For example, geotagged posts (i.e., posts with geographic locations) have been used to map ecosystem services in protected areas and species distributions. While these examples highlight the positive, pro-conservation aspects of social media, sometimes its use is more nefarious.

We reviewed both primary academic and grey literature to evaluate how social media might be impacting wildlife, recognizing both positive and negative effects.

Our findings revealed several overarching benefits and risks. From a beneficial standpoint, we found that social media: can increase pro-conservation behaviours among the public, increase funding for conservation, and motivate conservation policy or legislation; however, we also found that social media can result negatively in: species exploitation and illegal trade, unprecedented increases in tourism to protected areas, and perpetuate misinformation.

In most of the examples we found, sharing content on social media did not result in a detectable effect on conservation or wild populations; in our article, however, we highlight cases where real-world results occurred.

Images of Endangered proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus). We found that the use of powerful imagery on social media spurred swift governmental action to enforce conservation laws, highlighted by a case involving destruction of proboscis monkey critical habitat. Photo credits: Tim Sagorski (left) and Charles J. Sharp (right), Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

To better understand what might be driving the online behaviours that influence wildlife conservation, we related our findings to theories and models from social psychology.

Different psychological phenomena, like confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, provide a promising way to study the relationship between social media and people’s conservation-related behaviour and actions (or lack thereof).

The integrative use of both ecology and/or conservation with psychological sciences to explain how attitudes and intentions can impact environmental behaviours collectively describes the emergent field “Conservation Psychology.”

The use of Conservation Psychology to understand people’s online values and decision-making processes has been used extensively in marketing to understand (and influence!) consumption behaviours, so our hope is that a similar understanding could help guide social media engagement that is more likely to influence pro-conservation behaviours.We conclude with a discussion of best-practice recommendations for pro-conservation online behaviours.

Native black basses threatened by non-native species. The Black Bass Conservation Committee (BBCC) uses social media to connect with the public and share conservation messages in a relatable and engaging way. In response to a post on the BBCC Facebook page about hybridization between native and non-native bass species in the southeastern United States, a local angling group independently organized a tournament to harvest as many non-native bass as legally possible to enact positive change for the native fishery. Pictured here are two native species currently threatened by non-native bass, a Chattahoochee bass (Micropterus chattahoochee; left) and a Guadalupe bass (Micropterus treculii; right). Photos provided by research scientist and angler, Dr. Andrew T. Taylor.

We include recommendations specific to public social media users, social media administrators, non-governmental organizations, and government agencies to minimize conservation risks while maximizing beneficial outcomes.

By improving messaging, policing online misconduct, and providing guidance for action, social media can help achieve nature conservation goals.

It is not uncommon for individuals to think there is nothing they can individually do to stem global biodiversity losses, or they may be unsure of appropriate conservation actions to take, leading to apathy and inaction.

Here, we stress the power of individual action to support conservation using social media — the collective effort of many people can indeed make a difference, something we highlight often in our article.

In today’s rapidly changing world, social media presents a unique framework that, if used appropriately, can unify our voices and offer an opportunity to mobilize social change for global biodiversity conservation.

Read the paper — Evaluating the benefits and risks of social media for wildlife conservation by Jordanna N. Bergman, Rachel T. Buxton, Hsien-Yung Lin, Magdalena Lenda, Kayla Attinello, Adrianne C. Hajdasz, Stephanie A. Rivest, Thuong Tran Nguyen, Steven J. Cooke, and Joseph R. Bennett