Characterizing the trophy hunting debate on Twitter |
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Authors: | Luke Christopher Evans Matthew P Greenwell Victoria L Boult Thomas Frederick Johnson |
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Institution: | 1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK;2. National Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, Reading, UK;3. School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK |
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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. |
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Keywords: | archetypes debate characterization grounded theory mixed methods open coding social media trophy hunting Twitter arquetipos cacería de trofeos caracterización de debates codificación abierta métodos mixtos redes sociales teoría fundamentada Twitter 辩论特征 战利品狩猎 开放式编码 社交媒体 扎根理论 混合方法 |
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