Products sourced from protected species can be found across all manner of vending platforms, but with three billion active monthly users, Facebook is the grand pooh-bah. Pytka found 30 percent of the bowmouth guitarfish products on Facebook and 65 percent spread across other e‑commerce sites, such as Shopee and Lazada. “I’ve come to believe that Facebook is a driver of the global extinction crisis,” says Gretchen Peters, director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO), a nonprofit whistle-blower organization.
Prior to the emergence of the internet and online trading, vendors selling wildlife products had to connect with their customers largely through in-person networking, says David Roberts, a conservation scientist at the University of Kent in England who researches wildlife trafficking. But in the early 2000s, an increasing number of transactions in the physical world went digital, with wildlife trafficking being no exception. Today, nearly 6,000 species of plants and animals are traded illicitly, and the trafficking is worth up to $23 billion annually. It is the fourth-largest illegal market, and many animals, such as rhinos, pangolins, and some species of parrots and sharks, are at risk of extinction due to their popularity on the black market. (...)
eBay was the first to acknowledge the growing problem of online trafficking and banned all ivory sales on its platform in 2009. Another milestone was reached in 2018 with the creation of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. This alliance, spearheaded by animal welfare groups TRAFFIC, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, advises technology platforms on how to identify and prevent wildlife trafficking. So far, 47 companies have joined the coalition, including Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — eBay, TikTok, and other international giants like Alibaba. The coalition’s most recent report, from 2021, found that between all the platforms, more than 11.6 million products made from prohibited wildlife have been removed or banned. A spokesperson from eBay said that over 350,000 listings for prohibited wildlife items were blocked or removed in 2022. Giavanna Grein, a wildlife specialist at WWF, encourages platforms to be more transparent with the public and concedes that the efforts undertaken by the coalition are just one small part of the picture. “We fully acknowledge this is a very complex and challenging issue, and there’s no one organization or effort that can tackle this,” she says.
Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain. Despite eBay’s ivory ban, for instance, a quick search by Roberts identified what he believes to be elephant ivory being sold under a code name. The product is still so readily available, in fact, that he centers his students’ projects on it. Similarly, a quick search on Facebook Marketplace for rhino horns for sale in southeast Asia immediately yields several posts.
Meta’s own policy prohibits “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or solicit endangered species or their parts,” and in a statement, a spokesperson said that content that violates their policies is removed. However, whistle-blower reports published since Facebook joined the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online have been scathing. “Facebook policy and public comments about countering illicit content are rendered virtually meaningless by the firm’s ineffective follow-up and enforcement,” reads a 2020 report from the ACCO. To assess the severity of wildlife trafficking on Facebook, the report used search terms such as “exotic + animal + for sale” in English, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, turning up 473 Facebook pages and 281 groups openly selling wildlife products. Over half the pages were created since Facebook joined the coalition, showing that online trafficking appears to have increased.
In part, researchers were able to find so many illicit items because the Facebook algorithm is designed to recommend similar products and thus amplify the connections between vendors and prospective clients. (While looking at bowmouth guitarfish rings on Facebook Marketplace in Thailand, for instance, I saw posts for tiger claw amulets. After clicking to view them, my marketplace page automatically filled with curios made from guitarfish, tiger claw, and elephant ivory.) The ACCO report found 29 percent of the wildlife trafficking pages through Facebook’s “Related Pages” feature. Avaaz, a nonprofit that supports global activism, carried out a similar investigation and found that Facebook’s algorithm directed the researchers to dozens of wildlife groups, more than half of which contained potentially harmful wildlife trafficking content. Since it appears that Facebook’s algorithms are able to identify wildlife products, the algorithms should be able to hide these posts rather than promote them. When I asked about the discrepancy, Meta did not respond to this or any other question.
Peters says Meta is also passively profiting from the illegal activity. The platform makes money from embedded advertisements, and the online storefront Facebook Shops takes a small transaction fee from sales — including those of trafficked animals.
“[Facebook’s] platform is so big … and it’s in so many different languages that it’s really going to take a Herculean effort and a huge investment,” says Peters. “I don’t think Facebook is prepared to make the investments to clean up their own mess.” Peters also notes that Facebook could be more proactive in collaborating with law enforcement to dismantle criminal networks. “Facebook is sitting on a huge amount of information about some of the world’s biggest wildlife trafficking networks,” she says, and in many circumstances, the platform is not proactively showing that intelligence to law enforcement, claiming they’re protecting user privacy. Yet she says the firm is renowned for harvesting user data to sell to private companies. “It’s completely contradictory to me.” eBay is attempting to tackle this problem by implementing a regulatory portal that allows law enforcement authorities easy access to suspected criminal activity. (...)
In spite of the efforts of animal welfare and social justice groups like WWF and the ACCO, illicit wildlife sales are able to thrive online because platforms are protected from civil liability by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States. The act generally protects the platforms from being liable for the nefarious content they host.
“The way section 230 works is [that] any content created by a user like you or me or anybody else is considered free expression,” explains Peters. But she argues that illegal sales occurring over online platforms aren’t free speech — they’re felonies, and implementing something like a duty-of-care law would require platforms to remove criminal activity.
“I think [the platforms] should be held accountable,” says Roberts, who compares online trafficking to a bar allowing drugs to be sold in the bathrooms. The establishment is liable for allowing illicit activity on its premises. “How is that any different [from] a platform allowing illegal trade to take place?”
by Marina Wang, Naked Capitalism via Undark | Read more:
Image: via
eBay was the first to acknowledge the growing problem of online trafficking and banned all ivory sales on its platform in 2009. Another milestone was reached in 2018 with the creation of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. This alliance, spearheaded by animal welfare groups TRAFFIC, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, advises technology platforms on how to identify and prevent wildlife trafficking. So far, 47 companies have joined the coalition, including Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — eBay, TikTok, and other international giants like Alibaba. The coalition’s most recent report, from 2021, found that between all the platforms, more than 11.6 million products made from prohibited wildlife have been removed or banned. A spokesperson from eBay said that over 350,000 listings for prohibited wildlife items were blocked or removed in 2022. Giavanna Grein, a wildlife specialist at WWF, encourages platforms to be more transparent with the public and concedes that the efforts undertaken by the coalition are just one small part of the picture. “We fully acknowledge this is a very complex and challenging issue, and there’s no one organization or effort that can tackle this,” she says.
Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain. Despite eBay’s ivory ban, for instance, a quick search by Roberts identified what he believes to be elephant ivory being sold under a code name. The product is still so readily available, in fact, that he centers his students’ projects on it. Similarly, a quick search on Facebook Marketplace for rhino horns for sale in southeast Asia immediately yields several posts.
Meta’s own policy prohibits “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or solicit endangered species or their parts,” and in a statement, a spokesperson said that content that violates their policies is removed. However, whistle-blower reports published since Facebook joined the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online have been scathing. “Facebook policy and public comments about countering illicit content are rendered virtually meaningless by the firm’s ineffective follow-up and enforcement,” reads a 2020 report from the ACCO. To assess the severity of wildlife trafficking on Facebook, the report used search terms such as “exotic + animal + for sale” in English, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, turning up 473 Facebook pages and 281 groups openly selling wildlife products. Over half the pages were created since Facebook joined the coalition, showing that online trafficking appears to have increased.
In part, researchers were able to find so many illicit items because the Facebook algorithm is designed to recommend similar products and thus amplify the connections between vendors and prospective clients. (While looking at bowmouth guitarfish rings on Facebook Marketplace in Thailand, for instance, I saw posts for tiger claw amulets. After clicking to view them, my marketplace page automatically filled with curios made from guitarfish, tiger claw, and elephant ivory.) The ACCO report found 29 percent of the wildlife trafficking pages through Facebook’s “Related Pages” feature. Avaaz, a nonprofit that supports global activism, carried out a similar investigation and found that Facebook’s algorithm directed the researchers to dozens of wildlife groups, more than half of which contained potentially harmful wildlife trafficking content. Since it appears that Facebook’s algorithms are able to identify wildlife products, the algorithms should be able to hide these posts rather than promote them. When I asked about the discrepancy, Meta did not respond to this or any other question.
Peters says Meta is also passively profiting from the illegal activity. The platform makes money from embedded advertisements, and the online storefront Facebook Shops takes a small transaction fee from sales — including those of trafficked animals.
“[Facebook’s] platform is so big … and it’s in so many different languages that it’s really going to take a Herculean effort and a huge investment,” says Peters. “I don’t think Facebook is prepared to make the investments to clean up their own mess.” Peters also notes that Facebook could be more proactive in collaborating with law enforcement to dismantle criminal networks. “Facebook is sitting on a huge amount of information about some of the world’s biggest wildlife trafficking networks,” she says, and in many circumstances, the platform is not proactively showing that intelligence to law enforcement, claiming they’re protecting user privacy. Yet she says the firm is renowned for harvesting user data to sell to private companies. “It’s completely contradictory to me.” eBay is attempting to tackle this problem by implementing a regulatory portal that allows law enforcement authorities easy access to suspected criminal activity. (...)
In spite of the efforts of animal welfare and social justice groups like WWF and the ACCO, illicit wildlife sales are able to thrive online because platforms are protected from civil liability by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States. The act generally protects the platforms from being liable for the nefarious content they host.
“The way section 230 works is [that] any content created by a user like you or me or anybody else is considered free expression,” explains Peters. But she argues that illegal sales occurring over online platforms aren’t free speech — they’re felonies, and implementing something like a duty-of-care law would require platforms to remove criminal activity.
“I think [the platforms] should be held accountable,” says Roberts, who compares online trafficking to a bar allowing drugs to be sold in the bathrooms. The establishment is liable for allowing illicit activity on its premises. “How is that any different [from] a platform allowing illegal trade to take place?”
by Marina Wang, Naked Capitalism via Undark | Read more:
Image: via
