Building Bots to Raise Awareness on Endangered Animals on Social Media

Awareness of Endangered Species

Two of the only white Giraffes on Earth were slaughtered by poachers.

What can we as tech enthusiasts do to contribute towards the conservation of the endangered species?

Social Media Stats

• Reddit is a social media which has an average of 1.6 billion users on an average monthly basis
• About 56% of the Reddit users are young adults between the age of 18-29.

Social Media Stats

• Twitter is a social media which has an average of 152 million daily active users. 
• About 38% of the Reddit users are young adults between the age of 18-29.

Animals mentioned on Social Media

Survey on Reddit

• Surprisingly, Alpacas are one the least talked about animals.
• This made us really inquisitive and on further research, we found out that there are no wild alpacas left and about 98% of their population has already been wiped out.
• So we decided to raise awareness about Alpacas among Reddit users by making an Alpaca Bot.

What does this bot do?

• This bot is just basically a loop that checks all the latest comments, sees if someone has mentioned 'alpaca' and then comments a random fact on it.
• Karma is stored on a per-subreddit basis. If you have low karma in a subreddit, this will trigger a rate-limiting timer which limits you to 1 post/comment per 10 minutes.

PRAW

• Reddit allows programs to interact with their website by allowing those programs to access certain data.
• It also allows programs to submit posts and comment and upvote etc like a normal user would.
• This is called an API.
• In case of reddit, one API is called PRAW where you can use python to access all the latest comments from all subreddits.

TWEEPY

• Twitter allows programs to interact with their website by allowing those programs to access certain data.
• In case of twitter, one API is called TWEEPY where you can use python to access all the latest tweets from all the users.

Demo- How can you build your own bot?

www.tinyurl.com/foss-asia-bot

Survey on Reddit 

Helping Endangered Species

• Like Alpacas, there are many other endangered wild animals across the world.
• You can set up a PayPal account or have a donate button.
• The proceedings from your donation can go to WWF funds
• Within a month, we received $5 as part of my open source project of giving cute alpaca facts!

What are you waiting for? Start your fun bot this weekend!

Contact us

• We would love to hear from you and your responses will be Anonymous!
• Contact us:
• Anjali Menon:
  • cse.anjalimenon@gmail.com
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjalimenon1/
• Soham Chatterjee:
  • hello@csoham.com
    
  • Twitter: csoham_
  • csoham.com