WWF x Meta
Anthill Collective Director and co-founder Brittany Noel Taylor represented Meta and Instagram on a panel of environmental conservation and tech leaders working to research, monitor and eradicate the trade of CITES-listed endangered species online. In partnership with WWF, Brittany worked with Meta to find key indicators of endangered species trade and to design new product policies, and enforcement systems, to prevent them.
WWF
Meta
Instagram
Client
Environmental conversation
Technology
Sector
Policymaking
Research and impact analysis
Our services
One big goal—stop the illegal trade of endangered species happening across social media platforms like Instagram and Meta.
Project goals
Research into the trends and signs of illegal wildlife trade happening online. Then, based on that, a new set of product policies published by Meta and Instagram to stop trade happening on their platforms, as well as open-sourced information to help other digital platforms take action.
Outcomes
International regulations and treaties like CITES help outline which species are threatened, and help set clear limits on the sale or trade of those species. But, shadow markets happen in person, and online. Anthill Collective worked with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Meta to join an ongoing panel of big tech representatives collaboratively working to find, and stop, illegal sale of endangered species on their sites.
This involved using digital tracking and research tactics to understand the scale of the problem, and indicators of when it was happening. We collaborated with Meta’s policy enforcement teams to co-design tactical research methods to find activities happening online, and then to set up ongoing research methods that could measure the impact of enforcement over time.
As this is fundamentally a regulatory issue, we then partnered with Meta’s legal and policy teams to design updated product policies that could flex to the nuanced types of wildlife trading we’d seen in our exploratory research, and to make sure the policies were designed in a future-thinking way that could flex to ongoing regulatory changes. And, we worked with Meta’s enforcement teams to co-design tactical approaches to how these policies could be enforced on the platform.
Open-sourced learnings for even bigger change.
In partnership with WWF, we brought the project learnings and outcome to an ongoing collaborative panel with representatives from sector leaders like Google, Amazon and Etsy, all focused on open sourcing our learnings and enforcement efforts. This collaborative effort meant that one platform’s learnings could be integrated across the sector, extrapolating the impact and preventing ‘leakage’ of trade from one platform to the other.
The overall impact of this work was highly significant, in that it set a new precedent for big tech companies - which are often framed as competitors - working together to solve issues of collective importance. By working with WWF we were also able to incorporate their expertise in conservation efforts directly into tech initiatives, creating another bridge between sectors that don’t often collabrate.
