Who needs the dark web when you have Facebook?
October’s my favorite month. The air starts to get cooler, but not too cold. I can still get to work with just a thick flannel or a hoodie. Maybe a light jacket. There’s a nip in the air as the seasons change, a feeling of flux. Everything feels possible. It’s time for one of my favorite holidays, Halloween. Something about that atmosphere, something traveling on the wind, just makes the season perfect for a spooky holiday.
Here in America, we’ve got plenty to fear. Climate change, wild fires, harsher storms and floods, politicians denying climate change, a contentious political environment, and certain political parties attacking basic human rights. It can all be scary on its own. We cannot directly compare people’s pain or suffering. But it’s hard not to gasp at the difficulties women around the world face.
In many patriarchal cultures around the world, men do not treat women women like human beings. Those following the Abrahamic religions, that is, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, don’t have to look hard to find proof of this in their own religious texts. Elsewhere, you can find women who are denied control of their bodies, the right to vote, or other civil liberties. We’re still underrepresented in all levels of government, all around the world.
South Sudan has a particularly bad patriarchal society. Here, women are often traded for a dowry, to serve as a man’s wife. It’s sex slavery by a different name. Young girls, most under the age of 18, and usually around 15 or 16, are sold off by their fathers to other men.
Recently, this happened on Facebook. A girl was sold on Facebook to a wealthy older man. Facebook took two weeks to remove the viral post, long after a father sold his daughter through Facebook. Due to that father’s success and the large dowry he received, others will likely follow suit.
In This Article:
Cows, Cars, & Cash: The Price of a Human Life
Map via Bing
On October 25th, someone shared a photo on Facebook. It was of a young 16 or 17 year-old girl. Her father was auctioning her off to the highest bidder. The post wasn’t to stop the action, it was to help fuel it. It did exactly that. The post went viral, and this young girl became “the most expensive woman in South Sudan.” Facebook enabled this.
500 cows, three luxury cars, and $10,000. That’s what one woman was worth to her family. Bidding between men online was fierce among 5 men in particular, some of them government officials. Her family may live well now, without her. She, on the other hand, just became the property of a wealthy businessman. He may never treat her like anything but an expensive piece of property.
On November 3rd, this young girl was married to a wealthy older man.
Facebook removed the post on November 9th, over two weeks too late to stop the auction, and 6 days too late to stop her from becoming a rich man’s property.
Facebook as a Human Trafficking Broker
“That a girl could be sold for marriage on the world’s biggest social networking site … is beyond belief. This barbaric use of technology is reminiscent of latter-day slave markets.”
– George Otim, Plan International Country Director in South Sudan
Reports have called this girl “the most expensive woman in South Sudan.” Any families looking to sell their daughters and make a similar fortune just learned something new. Get rich quick, sell your daughter on Facebook. By the time anyone notices at Facebook, you’ll already have sold your daughter off to a rich creep.
Facebook says that human trafficking is against their rules and banned the person who posted the auction advertisement. But they were too late. Facebook says they’re expanding their safety and security team to more than 30,000 employees, and continuing to invest in technology that can help them detect trafficking like this before it happens. Still, this is yet another symptom of a disease at Facebook. No one takes privacy and security seriously at the company. It’s ruining and even ending lives.
South Sudan Law
Child marriage and selling your daughter is, fortunately, illegal in South Sudan. However, it’s still a common practice. South Sudan has a child marriage rate of 52%. That’s the percentage of women currently between the ages of 20 and 24 who got married before they turned 18. The fact that public officials so flagrantly participated in an illegal child bride auction shows just how blasé the country is about child brides.
Facebook could report these cases to the authorities, and ban anyone who tries to sell a family member on Facebook, but, in the end, the police in the country still have to make the arrest. If they’re not enforcing the law, people will see no reason to follow it. Admittedly, Facebook can only do so much.
FOSTA-SESTA and Facebook Hypocracy
In an unfortunate twist of irony, this is specifically something Facebook campaigned against. Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies like Google when they announced their support of FOSTA-SESTA, U.S. bills to hold companies accountable for sex trafficking on their websites. Google and others believed it would be too burdensome—they weren’t objecting for moral reasons—but Facebook thought they could prevent sex trafficking on their website. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, herself went to Washington to campaign for SESTA.
Now, Facebook’s hypocrisy is showing. It’s clear now that Facebook’s support of SESTA was a PR move only, likely made at the suggestion of Definers, to improve Facebook’s brand image. Facebook has not done the work necessary to secure their website, and now other young girls may be at risk.
What Should Facebook Do?
It’s easy to be an armchair tactician and shout, “Facebook should be doing more to protect young girls, women, and victims of hate speech!” But what else can Facebook do? The first thing they could do is increase their automated efforts. An algorithm should screen every post on the device before the user submits it. If the post contains phrases commonly used in trafficking, the post would be put in quarantine. Later, a person would review it, and either delete it and ban the person who made the post immediately, or publish it. To the person who shared it, they’d believe they posted successfully when they hit submit, so they’d never know to retry or attempt other word combinations to get around the filter.
Posts that go viral should get extra attention. Once someone’s post is on Facebook’s servers, their machine learning algorithms can do a much better job at detecting possible trafficking posts. If something is getting many views, shares, or comments, then it clearly has to be re-examined.
Facebook should also publish PSA ads to tell people that 1) Selling your daughter is creepy and wrong, and that 2) Any posts suggesting that a person is auctioning a girl will result in an immediate ban, with all of their information submitted to the police. It may be enough to deter this behavior.
Although, if you have to tell parents not to sell their daughter to a rich older creep and a life of servitude and possibly rape, empathy may already be a lost cause.
Your data is too profitable to waste time protecting you.
Finally, Facebook needs to hire more people. They need manual reviewers and they need more engineers working tirelessly on machine learning algorithms made to protect their users. Up until recently, Facebook has largely used their algorithms to make better predictions for advertisements and data analysis. They’ve focused on profiting off of their users instead of protecting them. As a result, Facebook has been a motivator for murder, bullying, genocide, depression, suicide, and now sex trafficking. If Facebook won’t police itself, legislators need to step in to protect users.
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