Data_Sheet_1_Biodiversity Exploitation for Online Entertainment.docx

Anthropogenic wildlife exploitation threatens biodiversity worldwide. With the emergence of online trading which facilitates the physical movement of wildlife across countries and continents, wildlife conservation is more challenging than ever. One form of wildlife exploitation involves no physical movement of organisms, presenting new challenges. It consists of hunting and fishing “experiments” for monetized online entertainment. Here we analyze >200 online videos of these so-called experiments in the world's largest video platform (YouTube). These videos generated about half a billion views between 2019 and 2020. The number of target species (including threatened animals), videos, and views increased rapidly during this period. The material used in these experiments raises serious ethical questions about animal welfare and the normalization of violence to animals on the Internet. The emergence of this phenomenon highlights the need for online restriction of this type of content to limit the spread of animal cruelty and the damage to global biodiversity. It also sheds light on some conservation gaps in the virtual sphere of the Internet which offers biodiversity-related business models that has the potential to spread globally.

人为的野生动物利用威胁着全球的生物多样性。随着在线贸易的兴起，它促进了野生动物跨越国界和大陆的实体流动，野生动物保护面临着前所未有的挑战。一种野生动物利用的形式涉及不到生物体的物理移动，这带来了新的挑战。它包括为了货币化的在线娱乐而进行的狩猎和垂钓“实验”。在此，我们分析了全球最大视频平台（YouTube）上关于这些所谓实验的200多个在线视频。这些视频在2019年至2020年间产生了约5亿次观看量。在此期间，目标物种（包括濒危动物）、视频和观看量迅速增加。这些实验中所使用的材料引发了关于动物福利以及动物在互联网上遭受暴力的常态化的严重伦理问题。这一现象的出现凸显了在线限制此类内容以限制动物虐待的传播和对全球生物多样性的损害的必要性。同时，它也揭示了互联网虚拟领域中的一些保护空白，该领域提供了具有全球传播潜力的与生物多样性相关的商业模式。