Facebook acknowledged in internal documents obtained by The
Associated Press that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity”
that saw Filipina maids complaining on the site of being abused.
Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram remained in the
app store. Yet these ads continue to appear.
Facebook says it took the problem seriously, despite the
continued spread of ads exploiting foreign workers in the Mideast.
Even today, a quick search for “khadima,” or “maids” in
Arabic, will bring up accounts featuring posed photographs of Africans and
South Asians with ages and prices listed next to their images. That's even as
the Philippines government has a team of workers that do nothing but scour
Facebook posts each day to try and protect desperate job seekers from criminal
gangs and unscrupulous recruiters using the site.
While the Mideast remains a crucial source of work for women
in Asia and Africa hoping to provide for their families back home, Facebook
acknowledged some countries across the region have “especially egregious” human
rights issues when it comes to labourers' protection.
“In our investigation, domestic workers frequently
complained to their recruitment agencies of being locked in their homes,
starved, forced to extend their contracts indefinitely, unpaid, and repeatedly
sold to other employers without their consent,” one Facebook document read. “In
response, agencies commonly told them to be more agreeable.”
The report added: “We also found recruitment agencies
dismissing more serious crimes, such as physical or sexual assault, rather than
helping domestic workers.”
In a statement to the AP, Facebook said it took the problem
seriously, despite the continued spread of ads exploiting foreign workers in
the Mideast.
“We prohibit human exploitation in no uncertain terms,”
Facebook said. “We've been combating human trafficking on our platform for many
years and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from
having a home on our platform.”
This story, along with others published Monday, is based on
disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to
Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower
Frances Haugen's legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a
consortium of news organisations, including the AP. The Wall Street Journal
previously wrote about Apple's threat to remove Facebook and Instagram.
Taken as a whole, the trove of documents show that
Facebook's daunting size and user base around the world — a key factor in its
rapid ascent and near trillion-dollar valuation — also proves to be its
greatest weakness in trying to police illicit activity, such as the sale of
drugs, and suspected human rights and labour abuses on its site.
Activists say Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, has
both an obligation and likely the means to fully crack down on the abuses their
services facilitate as it earns tens of billions of dollars each year in
revenue.
“While Facebook is a private company, when you have billions
of users, you are effectively like a state and therefore you have social
responsibilities de facto, whether you like it or not,” said Mustafa Qadri, the
executive director of Equidem Research, which studies migrant labour.
“These workers are being recruited and going to places to
work like the Gulf, the Middle East, where there is practically no proper
regulation of how they're recruited and how they're treated when they end up in
the places where they work. So when you put those two things together, really,
it's a recipe for disaster.”
Mary Ann Abunda, who works with a nongovernmental Filipino
workers' welfare group called Sandigan in Kuwait, similarly warned of the
danger the site can pose.
“Facebook really has two faces,” Abunda said. “Yes, as it
advertises, it's connecting people, but it has also become a haven of sinister
people and syndicates who wait for your weak moment to pounce on you.”
Facebook, like human rights activists and others worried
about labour across the Mideast, pointed to the so-called “kafala” system
prevalent across much of the region's countries. Under this system, which
allowed nations to import cheap foreign labour from Africa and South Asia as
oil money swelled their economies beginning in the 1950s, workers find their
residency bound directly to their employer, their sponsor or “kafeel.”
While workers can find employment in these arrangements that
allow them to send money back home, unscrupulous sponsors can exploit their
labourers who often have no other legal recourse. Stories of workers having
their passports seized, working nonstop without breaks, and not being properly
paid long have shadowed major construction projects, whether Dubai's Expo 2020
or Qatar's upcoming FIFA 2022 World Cup.
While Gulf Arab states like the UAE and Qatar insist they've
improved working conditions, others like Saudi Arabia still require employers
to approve their workers leaving the country. Meanwhile, maids and domestic
workers can find themselves even more at risk by living alone with families in
private homes.
In the documents seen by the AP, Facebook acknowledges being
aware of both the exploitive conditions of foreign workers and the use of
Instagram to buy and trade maids online even before a 2019 report by the BBC's
Arabic service on the practice in the Mideast. That BBC report sparked the
threat by Cupertino, California-based Apple to remove the apps, citing examples
of pictures of maids and their biographic details showing up online, according
to the documents.
Facebook engineers found nearly three-fourths of all
problematic posts, including showing maids in videos and screenshots of their
conversations, occurred on Instagram. Links to maid-selling sites predominantly
affected Facebook.
Over 60 percent of the material came from Saudi Arabia, with
about a quarter coming from Egypt, according to the 2019 Facebook analysis.
In a statement to the AP, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Human
Resources and Social Development said the kingdom “stands firmly against all
types of illegal practices in the labour market” and that all labour contracts
must be approved by authorities. While keeping in contact with the Philippines
and other nations on labour issues, the ministry said Facebook had never been
in touch with it about the problem.
“Obviously illegal ads posted on social media platforms make
it harder to track and investigate,” the ministry said.
Saudi Arabia plans “a major public awareness campaign” soon
as well on illegal recruitment practices, the ministry added.
Egypt did not respond to requests for comment.
While Facebook disabled over 1,000 accounts on its websites,
its analysis papers acknowledged that as early as 2018 the company knew it had
a problem with what it referred to as “domestic servitude.” It defined the
problem as a “form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside
private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception.”
The issue appeared a wide-enough problem that Facebook even
used an acronym to describe it — HEx, or “human exploitation.” Users at the
time reported only 2 percent of problematic content, likely due to the desire
to travel abroad for work. Facebook acknowledged it only scratched the surface
of the problem and that “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”
After a week, Facebook shared what it had done and Apple
apparently dropped the threat. Apple did not respond to requests for comment,
but Facebook acknowledged how seriously it took the threat at the time.
“Removing our applications from Apple platforms would have
had potentially severe consequences to the business, including depriving
millions of users of access,” the analysis said.
The problem, however, continues across both Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook appears to acknowledge that in more recent documents seen by the AP.
It described engineers accessing problematic messages in maid-recruiting
agencies' inboxes, including one in which a Filipina specifically is mentioned
as being “sold” by her Kuwaiti employers.
“Sometimes my head and ears hurt from being hit,” another
batch of messages from a Filipina in Kuwait read. “When I escape from here, how
will I get my passport? And how can we get out of here? The door is always
locked.”
Another Filipina housemaid in Kuwait, who described being
“sold” to another family through an Instagram post in December 2012, told the
AP that she knew of other cases of Filipinas being “traded online like
merchandise.”
"I was like an animal that was being traded by one
owner to another,” said the woman, who spoke from Kuwait on condition of
anonymity out of fear of reprisals. “If Facebook and Instagram won't take
stronger steps against this anomaly, there will be more victims like me. I was
lucky because I did not end up dead or a sexual slave.”
Authorities in Kuwait, where the Philippines temporarily
banned domestic workers from going after an abused Filipina was found dead in a
refrigerator in 2018 over a year after disappearing, did not respond to
requests for comment.
In the Philippines, the billions of dollars annually sent
home from overseas workers represent nearly 10 percent of the country's gross
domestic product. Those wanting to go abroad trust Facebook more than the
private recruiting agencies monitored by the government in part over past
scandals, said Bernard Olalia, who heads the Philippine Overseas Employment
Administration, which has the team monitoring Facebook postings.
Job seekers mistakenly believe the Philippine Overseas
Employment Administration endorses some of the Facebook and Instagram accounts,
in part as they misused the office's logos, he said.
With the coronavirus pandemic locking down the Philippines
for months, those wanting to work abroad are even more desperate than before
for any opportunity. Some see “application fees” stolen by criminal gangs, he
said. Others have been trafficked or sexually exploited.
“Words are not enough to describe their predicament but the
situation is devastating for them,” Olalia said. “They expected to recover
again, they invested just to ensure they'll have a destination only to end up
as victims of illegal recruitment. That's devastating on their part.”
Facebook suggested a pilot programme to begin in 2021 that
targeted Filipinas with pop-up messages and banner advertisements warning them
about the dangers working overseas can pose.
It remains unclear whether it ever began, though Facebook
said in its statement to the AP that it delivers “targeted prevention and
support ad campaigns in countries such as the Philippines where data suggests
people may be at high risk of exploitation.” Facebook did not answer specific
questions posed by the AP about its practices.
Olalia said his office for the last two years had a direct
line to Facebook to be able to flag suspicious accounts. But even that isn't
enough as more and more pop up to replace them.
“It will affect their income so they don't want to address
this,” he said.
That leaves some of the most-desperate job seekers in the
world vulnerable to promises and possible trafficking on Facebook.
“We've seen since the pandemic that these low-wage workers
who literally raise our children, they build our buildings, they cook our food,
they deliver our meals. They're not just low-wage workers, they're essential
workers,” said Qadri, the migrant rights expert. “So we really have a duty to
address these problems because our entire civilisation is dependent on these
people.” -AP
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