Give animals a voice this ‘Report It!’ Week
As the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition’s ‘Report It!’ Week 2025 begins, Born Free highlights the ways members of the public can speak out about animal abuse and exploitation.
(c) Born Free
Sadly, the exploitation and abuse of wild animals is widespread, and millions of animals suffer as a result.
New data released today exposes that shocking and harmful animal abuse content is rife on social media platforms, with Facebook containing the most animal abuse content.
Meta-owned Facebook accounts for 87.5% of all cruelty-related links reported by the public to The Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC), a collective of 34 animal protection organisations, including Born Free. Throughout 2024, 80,972 links were identified by the public and assessed by the coalition. Despite social media platforms implementing policies against such content, the data demonstrates gaps in identifying and removing the flagged content.
Online animal cruelty is increasingly being recognized within global legal frameworks. The legislative landscape around digital safety is rapidly evolving, with governments placing more defined responsibilities on platforms to mitigate online harms, including animal cruelty. Under the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023, animal cruelty is classified as priority illegal content. Platforms are required to proactively detect and swiftly remove such material, with non-compliance resulting in fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global annual revenue, enforced by Ofcom.
© Jo-Anne McArthur for Born Free
Report It! Week (May 23rd-30th) is dedicated to raising global awareness about online animal cruelty and reinforcing a powerful message on the importance of reporting this type of content to social media platforms. Report It! Week will drive the message that reporting matters. By raising awareness, we aim to influence social media users and companies to stop overlooking this cruelty.
SMACC is urging social media companies to take meaningful action against animal cruelty content shared on their platforms. SMACC calls on these companies to respond to reports from the public and animal protection experts by promptly removing abusive content. The coalition also invites platforms to collaborate with its experts to strengthen animal welfare policies and improve content moderation systems – ensuring that cruelty to animals has no place online.
YOU can help end animal suffering by reporting what you see. Whether it’s images of animals that you see posted online, or your own eyewitness experiences, please speak out – it really does make a difference.
Find out more about what you can do and how to report it below.
Reporting Animal Cruelty on Social Media Platforms
There is a huge amount of animal cruelty and exploitation posted online, particularly on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube. Born Free is a member of the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC) which works to address the issue of images and videos depicting animal cruelty being circulated on social media.
SMACC spotlights the importance of reporting instances of online animal cruelty, sending a clear message to social media platforms that animal cruelty is unacceptable and must be addressed. You can help by reporting the social media platforms displaying such images to SMACC via their online report form.
SUBMIT A REPORT ABOUT ONLINE ANIMAL CRUELTY
SMACC also provides a wealth of guidance and useful tools to help you to report what you’ve seen directly to the social media platforms involved, to encourage the platforms to take action against the posting of animal cruelty content.
Reporting Eyewitness Concerns for Captive Wild Animals
If you witness the suffering and exploitation of wild animals in captivity firsthand, whether in your home country or when travelling abroad, please report it to Born Free via our Raise the Red Flag platform.
We receive thousands of Red Flag reports about wild animals in captivity around the world, which provide vital evidence to support our advocacy efforts to secure policy change and effective legislation in order to end exploitation and improve animal welfare.
In addition to submitting your reports, we ideally need you to take further steps to speak out for the individual animals you may have encountered. All too often, captive facilities, ‘attractions’, travel companies, and country authorities state that ‘they never receive any complaints’, so it is important that they hear directly from their customers and the wider public. They have the power to influence positive change for the animals concerned and to take action to improve practices.
Please visit our Speak Out hub which links to our take action guidance pages, providing information on who to contact and useful links to help find their contact details.
NB If your eyewitness concerns don’t involve captive wild animals and you want to report domestic animal suffering, please report it to the RSPCA in the UK or the equivalent organisation in the country concerned, if one exists (visit wfa.org/directory).
Raise the Red Flag
If you see an animal suffering in captivity, please report it through our Raise the Red Flag platform.