Using Community Notes to Enact Attitudinal Change towards Urban Wildlife

Social media increasingly plays a dominant role in shaping public opinion and attitudes on various topics, including human-wildlife relations. While moderation efforts such as Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) primarily serve as fact-checking tools to combat misinformation, this study investigates their potential as vehicles for attitudinal change. We examine whether attitudes towards wildlife species exhibiting natural behaviours in urban environments can be neutralised or shifted through a Community Note that provides additional behavioural context. Using a between-groups experimental design, participants were randomly assigned to view a mock tweet either with or without an explanatory Community Note aimed at contextualising the animal’s behaviour. Additionally, for the gull species, we tested whether lexical framing influences shifts in attitudes. Validated Likert-scale questions measured immediate attitudes, and qualitative responses were analysed to explore underlying justifications. Our results indicate that the presence of a Community Note significantly reduced negative attitudes. Our results indicate that the presence of a Community Note significantly reduced negative attitudes. For example, the hedgehog group saw the largest percentage reduction in negative responses (75%), followed by rats (38.8%) and foxes (37.8%). A Binomial regression test shows this positive shift in attitude was statistically significant for both the rat (𝑂𝑅= 3.27,𝑝= 0.005) and hedgehog (𝑂𝑅= 4.95,𝑝= 0.019) groups, demonstrating community notes’ effectiveness for attitudinal change however this was not the case for the Mann-Whitney test. Our findings highlight the broader implications for detailed moderation tools in depolarizing discourse on social media. We show that the use of Community Notes in our context of urban wildlife can, and does, promote both learning and increases peaceful co-existence with wildlife. We also note that the use of Community Notes could help mitigate harmful messaging, as we continue to see increases in misinformation and disinformation, particularly concerning wildlife conservation and efforts to facilitate human-wildlife coexistence. We discuss the role of social media in shaping perceptions of wildlife, its current limitations, and how interventions like Community Notes could be expanded to promote positive human-wildlife relations in an increasingly urbanized and digitally connected world.