Alligators, Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny

Giblett, Rodney

doi:10.1080/10304310600814128

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Our findings show that reports about sharks and alligators seem to have great resonance regardless of the way in which the news was framed. This might be explained by a lower empathy for animal groups that are phylogenetically distant to humans (Ingham et al, 2015) and inhabit unfamiliar human environments (Bornatowski et al, 2019), where there is a deeprooted fear of these species (Campbell and Smith, 1993;Giblett, 2009). Conversely, a strong difference between graphic and nongraphic reports was shown for lion attacks, for which graphic reports were significantly more shared (Figure 4C).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media and Large Carnivores: Sharing Biased News on Attacks on Humans

et al. 2020

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The Internet and social media have profoundly changed the way the public receives and transmits news. The ability of the web to quickly disperse information both geographically and temporally allows social media to reach a much wider audience compared to traditional mass media. A powerful role is played by sharing, as millions of people routinely share news on social media platforms, influencing each other by transmitting their mood and feelings to others through emotional contagion. Thus, social media has become crucial in driving public perception and opinion. Humans have an instinctive fear of large carnivores, but such a negative attitude may be amplified by news media presentations and their diffusion on social media. Here, we investigated how reports of predator attacks on humans published in online newspapers spread on social media. By means of multi-model inference, we explored the contribution of four factors in driving the number of total shares (NTS) of news reports on social media: the graphic/sensationalistic content, the presence of images, the species, as well as the newspaper coverage. According to our results, the information delivered by social media is highly biased toward a graphic/sensationalistic view of predators. Thus, such negative coverage might lead to an unjustified and amplified fear in the public with consequent lower tolerance toward predators and decrease in the support for conservation plans. However, because social media represents a powerful communication tool, its role might be reversed to positive if used appropriately. Thus, constant engagement of scientists on social media would be needed to both disseminate more accurate information on large carnivores and stem the tide of misinformation before its widespread diffusion, a crucial step for effective predator conservation.

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