Using artificial intelligence to investigate illegal wildlife trade on social media

In a new article published in the journal Conservation Biology, scientists from the University of Helsinki, Digital Geography Lab, argue that methods from artificial intelligence can be used to help monitor the illegal wildlife trade on social media. Dr. Enrico Di Minin, a conservation scientist at the University of Helsinki, who leads an interdisciplinary research group where methods from artificial intelligence are being developed and used to investigate the supply chain of the illegal wildlife trade in an innovative and novel way, stresses the importance of such novel methods to identify relevant data on the illegal wildlife trade from social media platforms. "Currently, the lack of tools for efficient monitoring of high-volume social media data limits the capability of law enforcement agencies to curb illegal wildlife trade," says Dr. Di Minin "Processing such data manually is inefficient and time consuming, but methods from artificial intelligence, such as machine-learning algorithms, can be used to automatically identify relevant information. Despite their potential, approaches from artificial intelligence are still rarely used in addressing the biodiversity crisis," he says. Many social media platforms provide an application programming interface that allows researchers to access user-generated text, images and videos, as well as the accompanying metadata, such as where and when the content was uploaded, and connections between the users.