Evans, L.C. orcid.org/0000-0001-8649-0589, Greenwell, M.P. orcid.org/0000-0001-5406-6222, Boult, V.L. orcid.org/0000-0001-7572-5469 et al. (1 more author) (2023) Characterizing the trophy hunting debate on Twitter. Conservation Biology, 37 (4). e14070. ISSN 0888-8892
Abstract
Social media is an arena of debate for contentious political and social topics. One conservation topic debated online is the acceptability of trophy hunting, a debate that has implications for national and international policy. We used a mixed-methods approach (grounded theory and quantitative clustering) to identify themes in the trophy hunting debate on Twitter. We examined commonly co-occurring categories that describe people's stances on trophy hunting. We identified 12 categories and 4 preliminary archetypes opposing trophy hunting—activism, scientific, condemning, and objecting—whose opposition derived from different moral reasoning. Few tweets (22) in our sample of 500 supported trophy hunting, whereas 350 opposed it. The debate was hostile; 7% of tweets in our sample were categorized as abusive. Online debates can be unproductive, and our findings may be important for stakeholders wishing to effectively engage in the trophy hunting debate on Twitter. More generally, we contend that because social media is increasingly influential, it is important to formally contextualize public responses to contentious conservation topics in order to aid communication of conservation evidence and to integrate diverse public perspectives in conservation practice.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Twitter; archetypes; arquetipos; cacería de trofeos; caracterización de debates; codificación abierta; debate characterization; grounded theory; mixed methods; métodos mixtos; open coding; redes sociales; social media; teoría fundamentada; trophy hunting; 开放式编码; 战利品狩猎; 扎根理论; 混合方法; 社交媒体; 辩论特征 |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 19 Apr 2023 14:54 |
Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2024 08:36 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/cobi.14070 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:198299 |