Monkeys of TikTok

Social media has been shown to impact how people perceive wild animals, which in turn influences their approach to conservation. Using data from social media posts about primates and the engagement they received allows us to gauge how society sees primates in different settings (Nekaris et. al, 2013). TikTok has become extremely popular since its creation in 2017, and had over 1 billion users in 2021. The aim of this study is to describe what types of TikTok content that feature primates receives the most engagement. Data was collected from 107 videos that featured a primate. The species of the primate featured, setting, and presence of a human was recorded for each video. A Generalised Linear Model with a normal distribution was used to predict which variable significantly impacted the likes and comments per day. It was found that the three most commonly liked primates were macaques, spider monkeys and great apes. Pets were the most liked setting and human-primate contact received more likes than videos with no humans or humans with no contact. The GLM found that spider monkeys positively impacted likes per day (p