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<p>Biodiversity loss is accelerating despite decades of conservation efforts, highlighting the need for new strategies to engage the public and influence policy. Digital platforms, particularly social media, offer powerful opportunities to shape conservation discourse at scale. Here, we analyze wildlife-related YouTube videos to assess dominant themes, audience engagement, and the frequency of conservation-related calls to action. We combined human-guided coding with machine learning to classify thousands of videos and associated comments in our sample. We find that appreciation for wildlife is the most common attitude, while explicit calls to action (e.g., “Contact your senator”) are uncommon. Conservation-themed videos represent a small share of wildlife content and compete with entertainment-based content. These findings highlight the need for conservationists to rethink their digital strategy, moving from awareness-only content to messages that foster deeper engagement and action. Our study illustrates how social media analytics can inform biodiversity conservation and broader sustainability goals.</p>

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YouTube content on wildlife engages audiences but rarely drives meaningful conservation action

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月5日

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  • Derek Van Berkel,
  • Nilay Gautam,
  • Neil H. Carter,
  • Enrico Di Minin,
  • Yifei Zhang,
  • Hongfei Mei,
  • Sally Yin,
  • Sabina Tomkins

摘要

Biodiversity loss is accelerating despite decades of conservation efforts, highlighting the need for new strategies to engage the public and influence policy. Digital platforms, particularly social media, offer powerful opportunities to shape conservation discourse at scale. Here, we analyze wildlife-related YouTube videos to assess dominant themes, audience engagement, and the frequency of conservation-related calls to action. We combined human-guided coding with machine learning to classify thousands of videos and associated comments in our sample. We find that appreciation for wildlife is the most common attitude, while explicit calls to action (e.g., “Contact your senator”) are uncommon. Conservation-themed videos represent a small share of wildlife content and compete with entertainment-based content. These findings highlight the need for conservationists to rethink their digital strategy, moving from awareness-only content to messages that foster deeper engagement and action. Our study illustrates how social media analytics can inform biodiversity conservation and broader sustainability goals.