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

Abstract

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.

Media framing of spiders may exacerbate arachnophobic sentiments

“…In such cases, we used the lowest number (1,000). Even though we compared the number of shares for media reports published in different years, we consider this a reliable approach (see Nanni et al., 2020). Indeed, the share of online news on social media typically reaches a stable plateau at 30 days after publication (Papworth et al., 2015).…”

“…Studies suggest that these emotional feelings toward wildlife are inborn (Davey et al, 1998;DeLoache, Pickard, & LoBue, 2010;Prokop & Tunnicliffe, 2008;Strommen, 1995), often recurring with striking similarities across diverse cultural settings (Davey et al, 1998). As a direct consequence, animal-related emotions end up playing a key role in scientific and socio-political debates around both the management and conservation of wildlife (Drijfhout, Kendal, & Green, 2020;Frank, Johansson, & Flykt, 2015;Jones, 2006;Singh, 2009;Straka, Miller, & Jacobs, 2020;Zainal Abidin & Jacobs, 2019), and in the perception of risk (Bombieri et al, 2018;Hathaway et al, 2017;Knopff, Knopff, & St. Clair, 2016;Nanni et al, 2020).…”

Media representation of spiders may exacerbate arachnophobic sentiments by framing a distorted perception of risk

“…In such cases, we used the lowest number (1000). Even though we compared the number of shares for media reports published in different 6 123 124 125 years, we consider this a reliable approach (see Nanni et al, 2020). Indeed, the share of online news on social media typically reaches a stable plateau at 30 days after publication (Papworth et al, 2015).…”

“…Sensationalism in animal-related media reports is often associated with emotional words and expressions (Bombieri et al, 2018;Nanni et al, 2020). In our case, frequent words associated with sensationalistic content were alarm ("allarme"), agony ("agonia"), attack ("attacco"), devil ("diavolo"), fear ("paura"), hell ("inferno"), killer ("assassino"), nightmare ("incubo"), panic ("panico"), terrible ("terribile"), and terror ("terrore").…”

“…Studies suggest that emotional feelings toward wildlife are, indeed, in-born (Strommen, 1995;Davey et al, 1998;Prokop & Tunnicliffe, 2008;DeLoache, Pickard, & LoBue, 2010), often recurring with striking similarities across diverse cultural settings (Davey et al, 1998). As a direct consequence, animals-related emotions end up playing a key role in scientific and socio-political debates around both the management and conservation of wildlife (Jones, 2006;Singh, 2009;Frank, Johansson, & Flykt, 2015;Zainal Abidin & Jacobs, 2019;Drijfhout, Kendal, & Green, 2020;Straka, Miller, & Jacobs, 2020), and in the perception of risk (Knopff, Knopff, & St. Clair, 2016;Hathaway et al, 2017;Bombieri et al, 2018;Nanni et al, 2020).…”