Removing Harmful Wild Animal Social Media Posts: Nicola O’Brien of Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition

From taking selfies with wild animal individuals, to promoting them as pets, to faking animal rescues for clicks, content harmful to animals abounds on social media platforms like YouTube, Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. To help us identify what is inappropriate, harmful, or cruel content and what to do about it, in this 28-minute radio show, host Carrie Freeman interviews Nicola O'Brien, leader of the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition. Nicola explains why we should NOT engage with a harmful post or click/comment on it and why we should instead flag and report it to the platform, and then report it also via the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition reporting form here https://www.smaccoalition.com/report-a-concern as they act on and collect data on each social media platform and work to get policies that will recognize psychological animal harm and bad behavior promoting wildlife-human interactions as inappropriate content that should not be seen as meeting the platform's policies and thus gets taken down. 

Act on these petitions https://www.smaccoalition.com/petitions  because a lot of work is yet to be done to get these platforms to have truly animal-friendly policies that go beyond just removing obvious physical abuse torture videos (and helps ensure that people who use animals can't make money on social media content). We all need to get involved in pressuring our favorite social media platforms to have much stricter policies regarding nonhuman animal content so we don't promote harmful human practices and also cause animal suffering for those animals in the posts. Here's another resource to help you identify cruel content: https://www.smaccoalition.com/ask-yourself 

In Tune to Nature is a long-time weekly show airing on Wednesdays from 6:30-7pm EST on Atlanta indie station WRFG (Radio Free Georgia) 89.3FM hosted by Carrie Freeman or Melody Paris. Please consider donating to support this 50-year old independent, non-commercial, progressive Atlanta radio station at https://wrfg.org/  

See other guidelines for holding media accountable (journalism, filmmakers, advertisers and PR folks) at https://animalsandmedia.org/ 

Take care of yourself and others, including other species (whether online or in your neighborhood)