Building better conservation media for primates and people: A case study of orangutan rescue and rehabilitation YouTube videos

1. 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. 2. 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 are interested in understanding whether this is true
for social media posts (YouTube videos) by orangutan rescue and
rehabilitation organizations, which rely on social media for fundraising
and awareness-raising. Our goal is to provide data and recommendations to
guide these organizations in building media with positive conservation
impact while minimizing potential negative effects. 3. Using YouTube
analytics and sentiment analysis of comments on 118 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. 4. 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. 5. Based on our findings, we recommend that
orangutan rescue and rehabilitation organizations feature adult and mixed
age groups of orangutans rather than infants and juveniles, minimize the
amount of human-orangutan interaction shown, and talk about conservation
threats to orangutans in their videos. We also recommend that, as a
precaution, other primate rescue and rehabilitation groups also abide by
these suggestions.