Assessing online opinions of wildlife through social media

We present a technique to programmatically collect comments made about videos on YouTube, a popular social media website, and use content analysis to categorize and compare the frequency of comment types across videos and topics. For this article, we collected and categorized the comments of the 10 most viewed videos (in 2013) of three common North American mammals: the coyote (Canis latrans), Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), and raccoon (Procyon lotor) to demonstrate the potential of the technique. Half of the categorized comments for coyote encouraged their lethal control while the most popular comments for raccoon and opossum described these species as “cute” (47% and 34%, respectively). Analyzing YouTube comments is a promising avenue of research, and given proper development, could represent a useful approach to assess public opinions toward wildlife expressed online.