The illegal wildlife digital market: an analysis of Chinese wildlife marketing and sale on Facebook

Abstract

Summary At an estimated US$19 billion, the illicit wildlife trade is a serious threat to global conservation efforts. This criminal enterprise is now digital, expanding its footprint to consumers internationally by using the Internet and social media platforms. Recent studies have detected illegal wildlife selling posts on the popular social networking site Facebook in several different languages, including Chinese. In order to further explore this challenge to conservation, this study used big data approaches to identify and characterize wildlife trading activity in Chinese language on Facebook using an automated web scraper. We focused on keywords associated with elephants, rhinos and hawksbill turtles. We collected 10 303 unique Facebook posts over a 45-day period and were able to identify 639 posts from 268 unique users, which we suspect of directly marketing the sale of wildlife products. We also identified other species including Tibetan antelope, bears and African spurred tortoises. Facebook community pages appeared to have the highest percentage (48.2%) of wildlife selling posts. We also identified 14 different countries and regions with suspected wildlife-selling users, most located in Taiwan. Furthermore, we observed that the language used by some sellers changed from descriptive text to emojis and other code words. Collective action is needed from governments, law enforcement, civil society and technology companies leveraging big data approaches to better detect and interdict online Chinese-language wildlife trafficking.

Monitoring the Trade of Legally Protected Wildlife on Facebook and Instagram Illustrated by the Advertising and Sale of Apes in Indonesia

“…Regulations and legislation governing social media lag behind online developments in the illegal wildlife trade [36][37][38][39]. The "no live animals" or "no protected animals" sale policies that Facebook and Instagram have implemented are clearly not working for gibbons or orangutans, or the wide range of other protected wildlife in Indonesia.…”

A guide to using the internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade

“…Currently, wildlife trade on the surface web and indexed deep web (e.g., social media) is extremely abundant (Sung & Fong 2018;Xu et al 2020;IFAW 2018). The unindexed deep web, such as private text messaging apps (e.g., WhatsApp; Facebook Messenger), has remained relatively unexplored until recently (e.g., Sanchez-Mercado et al 2020;Setiawan et al 2019), thus the extent of trade is unknown.…”

Illegal Wildlife Trade in Traditional Markets, on Instagram and Facebook: Raptors as a Case Study

“…Increasingly, the wildlife trade, just like other trade, is moving online [26][27][28][29][30][31]; this also includes wildlife that cannot be traded legally, such as raptors in Indonesia [32,33]. There has been very limited quantitative analysis of the differences and similarities in the online trade in wildlife and the trade in traditional wildlife markets (see [18,28]).…”