The RSPCA have, at last, caught on to the fact that social media is provoking or encouraging kids to engage in animal cruelty. It’s a complicated issue but essentially the RSPCA is saying that children “torture animals for likes on social media”. Tell me something new. This has been an issue for years. Millions of kids have been exposed to animal cruelty videos.
This is an old problem. For a long time now a minority of children have sought notoriety by videoing their animal cruelty and uploading the video to Facebook and other social media platforms for ‘likes’ and followers. It is desperate stuff.
The RSPCA encourage the Department for Education to insert into the school curriculum education about animal welfare. I have been pressing for this for some time. How to respect all animals should be in the school curriculum in every country. Can you imagine it happening in China!? Afraid not.
I have also mentioned in the past that the social media platforms don’t do enough to prevent the uploading of animal abuse videos. All of the platforms have strict policies about this but the difficulty is enforcing those policies. This is not mentioned by the RSPCA and sometimes the administrators of these social media platforms demonstrate a disinterest in really making proper efforts to stop it.
Chris Sherwood, chief executive of the RSPCA said, “Social media isn’t the problem, it’s how we use it. But social media is opening up new avenues to share this content.”
I’m not sure that he is entirely correct. Everybody has it within them the ability to behave badly and children can be somewhat sociopathic in their behaviour. That is a norm I would say subject to parental education stamping it out. So, if Facebook presents the opportunity to express this bad behaviour kids sometimes take it. The primary problem is social media platforms on the Internet in my view as they present these unwanted possibilities.
The RSPCA received 354 reports last year of animal abuse on social media including dog ear cropping which is illegal in the UK unless it is done by a veterinarian. And Sherwood is particularly concerned about these fake animal rescue videos.
Fake animal rescue
I mentioned that several years ago or more. They proliferated on YouTube because immoral people recognised the fact that animal rescue videos did very well on YouTube. They had no chance of filming a genuine animal rescue and therefore they created it artificially which obviously entailed animal cruelty.
Times have changed
Importantly, Sherwood adds that a tiny fraction of children in the 1980s, before the use of computers and before the internet really existed, were exposed to animal cruelty. Nowadays almost 25% of children aged between 10 to 18 have witnessed it.
Sherwood wants the social media platforms to do more and he praised TikTok for a recent guideline change which allowed the reporting of animal protein content. I think he is being a little naïve on this to be honest because TikTok is rife with animal cruelty.
Impossible to moderate
A point that the RSPCA don’t make is that platforms such as Facebook and TikTok have so many uploads every hour of every day that it is impossible for employee moderators to ensure that everyone is safe and compliant with their policies. These platforms are reliant upon users to report abuse but not all users want to bother to do that.
Countryside Alliance
Education is indeed key to stopping animal harm as Sherwood said. Sadly, the RSPCA was criticised by the Countryside Alliance. This is a group of country people vote Conservative and who like to shoot animals for fun and illegally chase boxes in breach of the Hunting Act occasionally.
They’ve criticised the RSPCA in respect of a campaign in which they use the logo “For Every Kind”. The idea is to respect every animal no matter how insignificant. An advert showed a person moving a snail out of harm’s way on a pavement alongside images of intensively farmed hens.
The Countryside Alliance’s Tim Bonner said, “People expect it [the RSPCA] to focus on the welfare of domestic animals, not to promote respect for spiders and snails”. Mr Bonner is completely wrong. In respecting spiders and snails, you will respect all animals. I’m sorry to say that Mr Bonner is ignorant but I wouldn’t expect anything better from him.
UK government proposal
On this topic, The Sunday Times reports that the UK government is proposing tougher age restrictions on sites such as Facebook and WhatsApp in order to help protect teenagers’ mental health stop
A consultation is currently taking place in which the government will seek the views of parents on when children should be allowed to access social media website.
Currently, most social media platforms allow children as young as 13 to sign up as members of the idea is that there will be age restrictions with an age range between 13 and 16 suggested. But as mentioned above this is only part of the issue.
There’s a good argument actually that social media should be entirely banned for use by children. That will be impossible to enforce obviously but I think a lot of the mental health issues with children nowadays emanates from social media website before they exist, before the Internet, it’s almost certain that children had better mental health. Not enough is being done to tackle this problem.
