The Washington Free Beacon recently said that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, had decided internally to allow the solicitation of human smuggling on all of its websites and apps going forward.
According to The Free Beacon, it obtained an internal document in which California-based Meta says that this decision ensures that users will continue "to seek safety or exercise their human rights." Meta said that it contemplated the new policy over the past five months, meeting with many organizations that contributed "global perspectives and a broad range of expertise" to the company.
To aid in decreasing the dangers of human smuggling, Meta "proposed interventions such as sending resources to users soliciting smuggling services." It was also said that Meta would permit "sharing information related to illegal border crossing."
"We observed that a slight majority of stakeholders favored allowing solicitations of smuggling services for reasons associated with asylum seekers," the memo said. "We decided that this was indeed the best option since the risks could be mitigated by sending resources, whereas the risks of removing such content could not be mitigated."
Meta disputed elements of these reports.
"We regularly engage with outside experts to help us craft policies that strike the right balance between supporting people fleeing violence and religious persecution while not allowing human smuggling to take place through our platforms," Meta spokesman Drew Pusateri said in response to The Washington Free Beacon. "At this time, we have no policy changes to announce."
International organizations do not approve of human smuggling.
"Migrants and refugees are preyed upon by criminal organizations, sometimes with the tacit approval or complicity of national authorities, and subjected to violence and other abuses—abduction, theft, extortion, torture and rape—that can leave them injured and traumatized," a 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders said.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also disapproves of human smuggling and is concerned about the allegations against Meta.
“As you no doubt are aware, your company has an uncommonly sordid record when it comes to trafficking," Hawley said in a Feb. 2 letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "Your company ignored its own employees who sounded alarms about human traffickers using their website. Those employee concerns included identification of traffickers in the Middle East who used Facebook and Instagram to lure women into abusive domestic servitude and sex slavery.”
Hawley said Meta's policies could have the negative effect of attracting human traffickers.
“No matter what 'humanitarian' rationale your company can come up with for allowing individuals to solicit criminal activity, or what 'resources' your company intends to provide potential migrants, its current approach is inflicting incalculable damage," Hawley said. "By declining to remove user posts soliciting smuggling services, Facebook is effectively approving a gigantic beacon for human traffickers, who—even if they’re not permitted onto the platform themselves—can easily reach out to their targets through non-Facebook channels.”
Internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal demonstrated that when employees raised warnings about concerns pertaining to how the platform was being utilized, the response was generally “inadequate or nothing at all.” It has also been alleged that internal Facebook documents demonstrate that Facebook knew about human traffickers utilizing the website since 2018, according to CNN. The following year, Apple threatened to take Facebook and Instagram off the app store in response.