The influence of spider news on online information-seeking

Abstract

Fear of spiders is a widespread condition often disproportionate to the actual danger spiders pose to humans. Likely rooted in evolutionary history, fear of spiders might also have a cultural component. Recent studies have shown that a significant fraction of spider-related media reports are misleading and sensationalistic. Information-seeking behaviours serve as common coping mechanisms for our fears and anxieties, yet the link between spider-related news stories and such behaviors remains unexplored.We hypothesize that media reports foster concern about spiders, resulting in an increased awareness of spiders and health issues associated with them. We extracted 1486 reports in English from a public database providing a content-analysis of spider-related online traditional media reports published between 2010-2020. We examined whether the volume of spider-related queries in Google Trends, Wikipedia, and iNaturalist increased in the week following the publication of each news story.Sensationalistic news stories were associated with a small, significant increase in search volumes, compared to non-sensationalistic ones. The search volume for "brown recluse" (Loxosceles reclusa), which are potentially dangerous spiders, was higher after the publication date of news related to human-spider encounters. There was a significant positive relationship between the number of spider-related news stories published in a given month and the traffic on target spider-related Wikipedia pages, especially so for the page on brown recluse spiders.Our results suggest that traditional media have a detectable impact on the behaviour of the general public towards spiders, supporting the hypothesis that the fear of spiders is perpetuated by culture. Additionally, our findings indicate that information-seeking behaviour is a common response to learn about spiders and potentially fact-check spurious claims found in sensationalised news. By recognizing the role of media in shaping attitudes towards spiders and acknowledging the benefits of accurate representation, we can lay the foundation for a more informed and harmonious relationship between humans and spiders.

Fig 1

Results of analyses with Google Trends search volumes (A–C), Wikipedia page views (D–F), and iNaturalist observations (G–I). Left plots show daily search volume levels depicted by locally estimated scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) fits (filled lines) and 95% confidence envelopes (shaded surfaces), where day 0 corresponds to the date of news story publication. Center plots show density of values of change in search volumes after the publication date of each news. Right plots show estimated parameters (and 95% confidence interval) for linear mixed models testing the relationship between the intercept change in search volume after the publication of each news story and different news-level predictors. Exact model estimates are provided in Table B in S2 Appendix. * indicates p < 0.05.

Fig 2

Negative binomial generalized linear models testing if the monthly number of news published has an effect on the number of spider (order Araneae) observation uploads on iNaturalist (left) and Wikipedia page views (right). Exact model estimates are given in Table C in S2 Appendix.