The ease with which someone can upload a video to a social media platform has made it quite commonplace for extremely disturbing content to find its way onto someone’s timeline with all things having been considered and taken into account. Social media platforms have been hard at work to remove these videos before they can be seen, but in spite of the fact that this is the case many such videos manage to slip through the cracks.
The Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition or SMACC for short just put out a report that revealed the startling number of animal abuse videos that can be found on virtually every single social media platform out there. This includes Facebook, YouTube, TikTok as well as Instagram. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that SMACC found 840 distinct videos of animal cruelty that received a grand total of 11.8 billion views between them.
The majority of these videos, or 60% to be precise, were found on Facebook. That is unsurprising considering that Facebook has the largest number of MAUs out of any social media platform, but it is also a disproportionately high number. YouTube has almost as many MAUs as Facebook, but only 25% of the videos analyzed in this report were found on the video streaming site. That suggests that Facebook is not doing enough to remove the videos, and some further efforts by the company could make them a lot less prevalent than might have been the case otherwise.
The types of animal cruelty that could be seen in such videos was quite diverse. They all essentially involved people committing physical harm against an innocent animal. Many of these animals were also wild creatures that were being kept as pets, which in and of itself is a violation of their rights because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up preventing them from reentering their natural habitats. Social media platforms need to become better about regulating this content otherwise animals will continue to suffer.
Read next: Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Productivity Killer
The Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition or SMACC for short just put out a report that revealed the startling number of animal abuse videos that can be found on virtually every single social media platform out there. This includes Facebook, YouTube, TikTok as well as Instagram. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that SMACC found 840 distinct videos of animal cruelty that received a grand total of 11.8 billion views between them.
The majority of these videos, or 60% to be precise, were found on Facebook. That is unsurprising considering that Facebook has the largest number of MAUs out of any social media platform, but it is also a disproportionately high number. YouTube has almost as many MAUs as Facebook, but only 25% of the videos analyzed in this report were found on the video streaming site. That suggests that Facebook is not doing enough to remove the videos, and some further efforts by the company could make them a lot less prevalent than might have been the case otherwise.
The types of animal cruelty that could be seen in such videos was quite diverse. They all essentially involved people committing physical harm against an innocent animal. Many of these animals were also wild creatures that were being kept as pets, which in and of itself is a violation of their rights because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up preventing them from reentering their natural habitats. Social media platforms need to become better about regulating this content otherwise animals will continue to suffer.
Read next: Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Productivity Killer
