Ban Fake Animal Rescue Videos!

Animals are being intentionally placed in perilous – and even deadly – situations just so content creators can pretend to "save" them in a cruel, deceptive social media phenomenon known as the "fake rescue video."

This horrifying online trend consists of videomakers staging the "rescue" of animals being buried alive, attacked by other, deadly animals such as pythons, painfully trapped, infested with "parasites," or abandoned on train tracks or in other life-threatening locations. These videos can cause significant physical and psychological harm to the animals involved, including injury and sometimes death.

Animal protection nonprofit Lady Freethinker has been tracking fake rescue videos across major media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for the past several years, first exposing the problem in a startling report on abusive YouTube content in 2020. The issue has now expanded into a widespread trend that multiple social media companies are failing to adequately address.

In the latest report on fake rescues from the global Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC), the numbers are staggering. SMACC documented 1,022 links featuring what appears to be staged animal rescue content; Lady Freethinker contributed 417 of those. The majority of this content appeared on Meta-owned platforms (Facebook and Instagram), followed by TikTok and YouTube. 605 of the links obtained were watched 572,013,959 times.

Abused animals include cats, monkeys, dogs, reptiles, and more.

Watching, commenting, sharing, or otherwise engaging with fake rescue content gives the people behind the camera the views they want. If people continue receiving attention on social media for these cruel acts, they will continue, and more animals will suffer and possibly die. Social media platforms have a responsibility to remove the content – and prevent it from being posted in the first place!

Please sign and tell Facebook and other social media platforms to take meaningful action to stop content glorifying the suffering of cats, dogs, monkeys, and other innocent animals.