I know it isn't Facebook's fault when things like this pop up (though they notoriously don't respond or react quickly/at all), but it's unfair that they ultimately don't face any consequences. If it were a small local site they'd likely be forced out of existence in short order.
Countries can't let Facebook get a free pass on these things just because they're Facebook.
I'm saying a lot of sites are punished, but Facebook is able to get through/away with it because of scale. It's very much a two-tier punishment system.
Such a colossal platform is given leniency all around under the "we have too much content to police effectively" model.
most of it comes down to effective use of lawyers, not scale
although these things can be correlated, use of client-attorney privilege stonewalls a lot of pencil-pusher investigations and protects the entity from sanctions
Facebook doing unethical things again. What a surprise.
If you think this is an accident, let me remind you that I’ve personally reported a lot of posts breaking their community guidelines and none of them were deleted.
I would bet good money the offending posts were also reported plenty of times but no action was taken because it’s easier for FB to just close their eyes and pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
It’s that tug of war. When the Feds shut backpage because it was essentially a platform for illegal thigs, people were on the fence (buy it’s only a platform). Here, on the other hand where FB is merely incidental, sure, let the hammer comr down. Mind you, I’m not a fan of FBs at all, just pointing out what seens a discrepancy.
The thing is, I don't really mind if illegal things are happening on a dedicated platform. Users who are determined to break the law will break it anyway, so I don't care if they have a platform explicitly designed for doing so.
Having illegal things on a general-purpose platform is another thing. This can encourage a broad chunk of people to break the law, sometimes even unknowingly. This is way worse than the Backpage scenario.
I imagine the discrepancy is because a lot of people think that sex work shouldn’t be illegal, and there are good reasons to think that shutting down sites like Backpage just makes things worse. Whereas here, most will probably say that this stuff should be illegal, and getting it banned from Facebook is probably an improvement.
Sex work is not the same as human trafficking —which was one of the things they were indicted for. Most people who are okay with consentual adult sex work are definitely not okay with human trafficking (and its implications)
Right, but didn’t they shut down Backpage for their involvement with sex work, claiming that there were knockon effects for sex trafficking? I don’t think they were directly advertising trafficking.
For animal trading, if you ban them off facebook, they go elsewhere and then you need to hunt them down again. Better to leave them up, figure out who they are, get as close as you can to the top, then arrest everyone in one big operation. Don't blame facebook right away, they may have been instructed to keep these groups around.
I think many policing operations work like this. I used to work for a security company and we had a building across the street from an illegal brothel. I asked my supervisor why the police didn't shut it down and he basically echo'd what I wrote above; that if they bust it, it moves somewhere else in the city. If the police need to talk to one of the girls or the madame for some intel on another case, they have to go hunting for it again.
I think if you don't allow selling of illegal stuff on FB then you reduce the customer size because the seller needs to find some less popular platform, this means less sales so less illegal activity.
Police can track this people on the obscure/shady platforms if they want to catch them.
Nobody at facebook is saying to themselves "yup, keep the illegal stuff around, we need the numbers". That's such a farce, you clearly just have a hate-on for facebook. The article is about 12 facebook groups. Twelve! Wow. So many users.
They absolutely can track the traffickers elsewhere, but they are here on facebook now and if the facebook groups go away, they need to find them again. That costs time and money. Is your hate for facebook so strong that you are blind to this?
This is exactly what happened when backpage got shut down. Police lost all their leads on illegal sex trafficking, but did not have any meaningful impact on the illegal market - it just moved to another venue.
Countries can't let Facebook get a free pass on these things just because they're Facebook.