• Social media platforms in India are becoming hubs for content on wildlife hunting and exploitation with a high number of reels reported on Instagram.
• No study has systematically measured the scale of cyber-enabled wildlife crime in India, with existing research limited to small case studies.
• Experts recommend amendments to the existing wildlife law, training forest department personnel, holding social media companies accountable and creating public awareness, among other measures.

In 2025, P.M. Muthanna came across an Instagram reel that showed someone demonstrating how to capture wild animals. This was an activity that could not only harm wildlife but also violate wildlife protection laws. Muthanna, who heads field conservation at Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS), a wildlife organisation based in Karnataka, couldn’t ignore the reel that seemed to normalise illegal handling of animals. “My co-workers and I started checking and compiling such videos being circulated on social media, particularly Instagram,” he says.

Among the reels he stumbled upon were those showing a civet cat stuck in a jaw trap, which had over 25,000 likes; people hunting monitor lizards; a jaw trap manufacturing workshop, and more. In February 2026, he sent a letter to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a government body that combats organised wildlife crime, urging it to take action against eight Instagram accounts that show and sell jaw traps, devices that injure or harm animals, and demonstrate the illegal hunting of monitor lizards, which are protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.

These kinds of reels are playing on phone screens across India. Showcased as ordinary moments from the creators’ lives, the content ranges from what an illegally-kept pet Indian star tortoise eats to going on a hunting trip. Cyber-enabled wildlife crime in India is a rapidly emerging threat which is subtle, sophisticated, and sometimes hard to identify, says Pradipty Bhardwaj, a Ph.D. scholar researching the adequacy of Indian law to combat such crimes. She also works with the UK-based charity Langland Conservation.

Moving wild species out of their native ecosystems can create opportunities for pathogens to cross species barriers, increasing the risk of disease spillover into humans and other animals. Illegal wildlife trade is the fourth largest illicit transnational activity globally. According to a 2021 investigationpublished by the nonprofit International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), nearly 1,200 online advertisements featuring almost 2,400 animals, animal parts, derivatives and products from protected species were found across 34 U.S.-based online marketplaces.

In India, no study has systematically measured the scale of cyber-enabled wildlife crime on social media. The existing research is limited to small case studies, which are platform-specific and rely on official case counts. Currently, there are very few initiatives to address this problem. Actions such as WCCB’s Operation Wildnet, an intervention where authorities booked around 80 cases of cyber-enabled wildlife crime between 2017 and 2021, remain an exception.

Wildlife crime is burgeoning on social media

Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), a wildlife conservation nonprofit, has been diligently monitoring wildlife crime on social media for the past one and a half years. The arrival of high-speed internet through data penetration in India has aided content creation, says Debobroto Sircar, who heads WTI’s wildlife crime control division. Social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are used for showing illegal wildlife content in India, with Instagram being the most prominent platform for such content, he tells Mongabay-India.

There is a wide range of videos that depict crimes against wildlife, Sircar says. Videos showing hunting, such as flying a drone over an animal to chase it, using dogs to hunt, and digging out monitor lizards from the ground; videos advertising harmful hunting equipment such as jaw traps and snares, which are often marketed as a solution for crop raids; videos where people are seen extracting wildlife articles such as skin, meat and fat, and providing cooking instructions; and finally, videos featuring exotic pets, with no clarity on how such a pet was procured, are all easily available for viewing and often earn thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, pointing to a growing audience. “You can see comments asking, ‘how much is the price and where I can get it’. The comment section is completely a marketplace,” says Sircar. Once buyers and sellers connect via Instagram, they move the conversation to encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram, he adds.

WTI collects information about such accounts to build evidence to alert law enforcement agencies and also reports such content to social media companies for its removal. Since January 2025, it has flagged a thousand YouTube videos and succeeded in getting over 90% of them removed. However, out of the content it flagged on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram, only 15% was removed.

Social media platforms are failing at content moderation. While reporting content, WTI noticed a pattern — when they reported content about wildlife crime, Meta removed only the videos regarding the sale of live wildlife and hunting, but not those featuring teeth, claws, or other body parts and extracts derived from wildlife. Despite Instagram’s stated policy of working with wildlife organisations to remove content depicting poaching, animal abuse, and the sale of endangered species, the accounts listed in Muthanna’s complaint to WCCB are still active and their content is available to watch, which raises questions about how and whether the social media platform enforces this policy.

Graphic hunting videos and exotic animal content can generate strong engagement, which recommendation algorithms may unintentionally amplify before moderators intervene, says Rohini Lakshané, an independent technologist and researcher, in an email to Mongabay-India. “Since moderation systems are primarily optimised around higher-profile harms such as terrorism, nudity, fraud, or political manipulation, wildlife trafficking might receive comparatively less investment and enforcement attention,” she says. Platforms have also laid off their moderation teams in recent years and are understaffed, she says, while adding that they are increasingly using AI for moderation, which may lead to such content going undetected.

Presently, India lacks a law that explicitly covers cyber-enabled wildlife crime. However, cases can be booked under existing laws such as the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. Using this, the forest department can reach out to social media companies, but the forest department officials often lack familiarity with the procedure and technology, notes Bhardwaj.

The law and the hurdles in its implementation make it difficult to check such crimes. “The Wildlife (Protection) Act is comprehensive but lacks specific provisions for electronic or online crimes, which were not considered when the law was framed back in 1972,” says Bhardwaj.

Other challenges include proving the link between online content facilitating real-world crimes and the difficulty of booking cases without physical seizure of wildlife items, which is a core requirement of the Act, she emphasises. Additionally, advertisements about wildlife are not explicitly prohibited by Indian law, further complicating matters, she says.

Preventing cyber wildlife crime

Bhardwaj suggests a set of measures to curb cyber-enabled wildlife crime in India — amending the law to include the online aspect, updating social media policies based on Indian law, regulating advertising under the wildlife law and training the forest department to detect crimes online and file digital evidence effectively in court. There is also a need for public awareness on the illegality of owning wildlife species, she adds.

According to Sircar, social media companies need to partner with conservation organisations, wildlife experts and activists in India, to appoint them as a “Trusted Flagger”, a status granted to civil society organisations in the European Union in 2025, enabling them to identify and flag illegal activities on platforms. Since India lacks such a system, WTI is seeking to join the YouTube Priority Flagger programme, through which government agencies and nonprofits can contact YouTube directly about content violating the platform’s community guidelines. In June 2026, WTI also launched a campaign calling on citizens to report wildlife crimes online and demanding accountability from platforms.

Muthanna feels that social media giants have a moral responsibility to remove such content. But Bhardwaj explains that under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, social media companies’ liability is limited to exercising due diligence and acting once they receive knowledge of illegal content. However, she adds that there is an ongoing discussion worldwide in the field of wildlife conservation about holding social media companies more accountable for their role in facilitating illegal activities.

It has been over six months since Muthanna sent the letter to WCCB about the Instagram accounts that had posted jaw traps and hunting videos. And he is yet to hear back.

“Compared to Meta, NGOs like ours are very small. We operate in small pockets and do not have the resources to tackle companies like Meta. Our hope rests with the forest department, WCCB, customs and police. They have enough strength and means to tackle them,” he says.

First Published by Mongabay on 27 August, 2026.