By Veronica Nanni, Irene Moiola, Catherine Scott, and Stefano Mammola.
Animals that people fear—like spiders, snakes, and large carnivores—are often featured in exaggerated and misleading news stories that play on people’s emotions. Social media can further promote fear and negative perceptions by spreading only the most sensational and negative news. Indeed, by making such stories more visible, social media can influence how people feel about wildlife. To understand more about how social media amplify our fear of certain animals, we asked the question: What features of news stories drive people to share spider-related articles on social media?
To find out, we looked at a global collection of 5,348 news articles about spiders from 81 countries in 40 languages, published between 2010 and 2020. Each news article had information about human encounters with spiders and details about the content, like how many errors it had, if experts were consulted, and whether it tapped into sensationalism. We used statistical models to understand what makes people more likely to share news on social media. Our findings show that the most widely-shared articles were sensational stories about potentially dangerous species, regardless of whether the content was factually correct. On the other hand, people rarely shared most articles and never shared 53% of them. Never shared articles usually focused on harmless spiders, didn’t have pictures, and were from local news outlets.
We suggest that understanding how social media affects the global reach of news stories can help stop fear from spreading and reduce conflicts between humans and wildlife. By encouraging scientists, journalists, and communicators to work together and teaching people to fact-check spider stories, we can help improve how spiders are viewed and understood. This is especially important because unnecessary fear of animals can lead to negative social and economic effects.
Relational Thinking 