A Cost for Instagram Post: An Ethical Elephant Tourism Analysis

The use of social media influenced the rise of travel photographs, especially selfies with wild animals. One of the most popular tourist attractions is the elephants in Phuket, Thailand. Phuket promotes a conservation-based tourism model that commits to providing a safe and natural environment for elephants. The effects of social media on animal welfare encourages the desire for tourists to come closer and interact with the animals. This situation can violate the ethical standard for elephant tourism by NGOs which do not allow close contact interaction with the elephants. The aim for this paper is to analyze the elephant-tourist interactions in Instagram photographs. This paper uses qualitative content analysis for the method and uses the hashtag elephantsanctuaryphuket to filter the posts in Instagram. The results from 100 posts show that 83% of the poses made by tourists are unethical because they involve close contact interaction with the elephants. In terms of tourist's attention for ethical tourism in their caption, 75% of the tourists wrote low involvement captions. The findings show that there is a lack of awareness or confusion among tourists about ethical standards in interacting with elephants. Most of the tourists do not have enough awareness about ethical tourism and only visit elephant sanctuaries for the pictures on social media.