Social media are a wellspring of information about how people view the world and will be no less so for conservation-related matters.
A team of researchers realized this and combed through thousands of posts on the online social network X (formerly Twitter) to assess how internet users talk about invasive species, considered one of the major threats to global biodiversity.
Analyzing more than 500,000 tweets published between 2006 and 2021 referencing “invasive species,” it was found that the discourses tend strongly to feature animals as protagonists, much more than plants. Cats are at the top of the list of animals most mentioned in posts about invasive species, followed by pigs, dogs, squirrels, goats, rats, and horses.
In an article published in the journal Ecology and Society, the scientists highlight the scarcity of plant references in discourse about invasive species on social media. They call this “plant blindness,” or, literally translated into Portuguese, “cegueira vegetal.”
Despite this bias in favor of animals, and of mammals, “some of the most harmful invasive species are plants,” notes Susan Canavan, from the University of Galway, in Ireland, and the study’s first author. “But they do not capture the public’s imagination in the same way as animals.”
“When invasive plants are invisible in public discourse, obtaining support for their management becomes exponentially more difficult,” she adds, noting that plants attract, on average, less than 4% of overall conservation funding, a disparity that these researchers say is well reflected in social media and is reinforced by it.
The investigation also revealed that about 60% of all shared or retweeted content about invasive species was generated by just 1% of users. Among this minority are reliable sources, such as The New York Times, CNN, government agencies, and biologists, but also people with no conservation expertise whatsoever, but with a large reach, such as influencers and digital celebrities.
Thus, Canavan emphasizes that “a small number of voices shapes the way millions of people understand invasive species.”
This team says that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022 has made it more difficult for academics and scientists to access data that allow researchers to understand how people think and talk about certain topics, including issues relevant to biodiversity conservation.
Access to social media data is now more expensive, the article’s authors say, placing it beyond the means of many researchers, so future studies on public perceptions may have been left without an important source of information.
