Citizen Jasoos
The Problem
Information about wildlife being sold and transported is easily accessible through online platforms, and is traded as publicly available information. This can lead to people thinking selling and buying wildlife online is not bad and is fairly common. For those who know it’s illegal or a problem, the persistence of this problem can make them feel increasingly helpless as they can often see this activity but do not have means to directly affect it. There needs to be a publicly available method of anonymously reporting information shared about wildlife trafficking activity online- for both live animals and wildlife products, so that information can be shared with law enforcement for local action. This information also needs to be shared to bring to public attention the complicity that social media companies have in wildlife trafficking, by allowing sellers to continue their business with impunity. Public awareness and action at the citizen level need to be brought together to inform on wildlife trafficking activity, hold government bodies and individual companies to account. Information must be independently verifiable, shared securely and formatted such that information on trafficking activity can be analysed and disseminated to the public.
Our Proposal
We want to leverage social influence, emotional appeals, choice architecture, information and material incentives to develop an online platform or app that will allow social media users on Facebook or other sites to take snapshots/screengrabs of ads selling illegal wildlife (live or products) and submit these screenshots along with a URL to our platform/app. Using normative and value-based messaging, we would recruit users who are already members of or involved in conservation or environmental movements, organisations, groups or pages. These ‘online sleuths’ would report an ad if they came across it, or would find ads and then report them to our platform. We would offer different ‘achievement’ levels to motivate engagement and normatively influence other social media users. This is a rare opportunity to actually be able to take action to mitigate a global conservation issue without being restricted to merely donating money. Using a social responsibility argument, we would also empower users by emphasizing that what we’re asking them to do requires minimal effort, guarantees anonymity and has a large payout - both in terms of rewards for engaging, and in terms of real-world impact. We hope that this data will further motivate social media giants like Facebook, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, and ultimately, policymakers to keep a closer watch on online ads selling illegal wildlife, make plans for better monitoring and enforcement.
We Assume that...
Displaying the issue will create behaviour change, & encourage people to call out this behaviour & demand accountability from social media companies & government bodies rather than becoming apathetic.
Users will not obfuscate the data collected by providing information from too long ago, or with pictures take from misleading sources.
Constraints to Overcome
Developing the code base to receive and grade images, via an encrypted server will be the biggest initial constraint to developing this project. Following this, formatting data such that it can be transmitted to law enforcement and presented in a spatially explicit format with information pertaining to the number and location of wildlife trafficking activities flagged and displayed publicly.
Current Work
Developing the code base to ensure that data submitted by the public is secure and in a format ready for analysis. Developing a typology of members of conservation and other environmental groups on Facebook, to start with, giving us a starting reference point to use in building a more thorough recruitment strategy. Determine potential collaborators with whom we can build the technical aspects of our proposed reporting platform. Discuss the kinds of tools we would need to incorporate into the full web-based platform and the mobile-based application. Conduct a test-run by locating real-world examples of the kinds of wildlife-for-sale ads social media users are likely to find online, and submitting screenshots and data that we would originally require users to submit to our platform. Use the data from this test run to: a) determine whether the platform is working as intended, and b) feed it into the development of the web-based platform to enable identification of common markers etc.