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To the Editor—Illegal trade in wildlife is booming on e-commerce platforms 1, the ‘dark web’2 and social media 1, 3. The ease of access and high number of users of social media make it a particularly concerning venue 1, 3, 4. Wildlife dealers use social media to release photos and information about products to attract customers and to market their products to networks of contacts. We currently lack the tools for automated monitoring of high-volume data that are needed to investigate and prevent this illegal trade, but machine-learning algorithms offer a way forward.

Operating within the broader field of artificial intelligence, the concept of machine learning refers to algorithms that learn from data without human guidance. Deep-learning algorithms 5 are a family of these algorithms that are highly successful in classifying image contents and locating individual objects within them, and in processing natural language …