The Illegal Wildlife Digital Market: An Analysis of Chinese Wildlife Marketing and Sale on Facebook

 

Valued at US$19 billion, wildlife trafficking is a serious threat to global conservation efforts. Like many modern industries, this wildlife trafficking has gone online, reaching buyers all over the world through the Internet and social media platforms.

In this report, big data is used to identify wildlife trafficking in the Chinese language using an automated web scraper. Over a 45 day period, researchers focused on wildlife trafficking keywords associated with elephants, rhinos and hawksbill turtles and found 639 posts from 268 users whom they suspected of wildlife trafficking.

In order to combat wildlife trafficking and save endangered animals, leveraging big data approaches like this can help to better find and remove online Chinese-language wildlife trafficking.

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Authors:
Qing Xu
Mingxiang Cai
Tim K Mackey