Paper short abstract:

YouTube is a social media platform that can drive new traffic to conservation agencies and greatly increase public awareness, but can also inadvertently send the wrong message about wild animals. For primates, the use of young animals and human-animal interaction leads to negative viewer response.

Paper long abstract:

Conservation organizations rely on social/internet media platforms to raise awareness and fundraise. Social media is a double-edged sword: it can be a wide-reaching and effective tool for education and fundraising, but can also have counter-productive impacts on public views toward wildlife and understanding of wildlife conservation. For example, depicting humans interacting with wildlife in media may increase video popularity, but animals shown in anthropogenic contexts are also viewed as appealing pets. We examine this in social media posts by orangutan rescue and rehabilitation organizations (ORRs), which rely on social media for fundraising and awareness-raising. Our goal is to provide data and recommendations to guide conservation organizations in building media with positive conservation impact while minimizing potential negative effects. Using YouTube analytics and sentiment analysis of comments on 119 videos, we ask how viewer responses to videos vary with 1) the amount of human-orangutan interaction depicted, 2) the ages of the orangutans featured, and 3) the mention of threats to orangutans. Videos with longer human-orangutan interaction time were viewed more, but comments on them were significantly more likely to be negative toward Indonesian/Malaysian people. Comments on orangutan rescue/rehabilitation videos were more likely to be categorized as negative for orangutan conservation compared to videos about orangutans generally, and within these, so were comments on videos featuring infant and juvenile orangutans. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for conservation organizations featuring animals in their YouTube videos and other social media.