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Instagram Now Showing Notifications About Animal Abuse

By Scuba Diving Editors | Updated On December 10, 2017
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Instagram Now Showing Notifications About Animal Abuse

instagram animal abuse notification

Searching some hashtags, including #turtleselfie, prompts a notification that warns of potential animal abuse.

Scuba Diving Instagram

Each time you scroll your Instagram feed, you’re almost guaranteed at least one animal post to pop up, be it of your friend’s new puppy, a funny viral video or a carefully posed encounter with a wild animal.

Some of the latter now come with a warning about the potential harm these orchestrated meetings could have on wildlife. Searching for a range of wildlife hashtags now prompts a pop-up notification that reads: “Protect Wildlife on Instagram: Animal abuse and the sale of endangered animals or their parts is not allowed on Instagram. You are searching for a hashtag that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals or the environment.” It then gives the option to learn more about wildlife exploitation via Instagram’s Help Center, show the photos or cancel the search.

The notifications come after World Animal Protection petitioned the photo-sharing platform to include more information about animal abuse in its user guidelines. WAP and the World Wildlife Fund helped Instagram come up with hundreds of hashtags to display the warning about animal abuse.

instagram animal abuse

The notification warns that photos under certain hashtags could have been taken in a manner that is harmful to animals.

Scuba Diving Editors

Examples of triggering hashtags include #dolphinkiss, #turtleselfie and #slothselfie, but they will also extend to more egregious activity, like #exoticanimalforsale and other tags that could be used to find live animals or animal parts for sale. Instagram is not releasing the full list of hashtags so users find them organically.

Cassandra Koenen, head of wildlife campaigns at World Animal Protection, who worked on the list with Instagram, told National Geographic that she hopes the notifications will prompt people to stop and relfect: “If someone's behavior is interrupted, hopefully they'll think, 'Maybe there's something more here, or maybe I shouldn't just automatically like something or forward something or repost something if Instagram is saying to me there's a problem with this photo.'”