Human traffickers are using social media platforms to sell domestic slaves, and their creators must find solutions to stop it.
Slavery was officially abolished worldwide in 1981 after Mauritania became the final nation to prosecute slaveholders and human traffickers. But despite federal legislation on a global scale, human trafficking is still prolific in certain countries and operations are growing increasingly sophisticated. Today, these shady industries have hijacked the business models and commercial opportunities available on social media platforms.
Over the last few decades the internet has blurred the once clear line between the social and commercial worlds, and today they’re one and the same. People can go from surfing their newsfeeds and chatting to friends, to shopping through user tailored ads in a matter of short clicks. And these same principles now apply to nefarious and unlawful networks. It comes down to supply and demand. As long as people are searching for and participating in sex and labour trafficking, it will continue to appear on the number one source for expanding businesses: the internet.
It may shock you to learn that the same social networks we sink hours into on a daily basis are some of the most bustling hubs for human trafficking. In the noughties, victims of trafficking were largely tricked into joining rackets through mock job-advertisements on Craigslist and MySpace, while voluntary individuals in the sex industry could be recruited into schemes under a trafficker’s control on Backpage.com – a notorious website intrinsically designed for concealing and spreading all types of illegal content.
Today, the options for traffickers have only extended. From January 2015 through December 2017 there were 845 recorded cases of human trafficking, including 250 victims found on Facebook, 120 on dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, 78 on Instagram, and almost 500 on online chatrooms or hidden forums. The BBC has reported that majority of the trade’s recent ‘big business’ has been carried out on Instagram, where trafficking posts are promoted via algorithm-boosted hashtags, while sales are negotiated through direct messages.
On Tuesday (Nov 6th) an undercover squad in Guinea, West Africa, bore witness to the sale of a 16-year-old girl for $3800. The UN Special Reporter on Contemporary Forms of Slavery Urmila Bhoola described the case as ‘the quintessential example of modern slavery’, and demanded that tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Instagram be held accountable for hosting content ‘promoting an online slave market’.