Social media giant Facebook has become the main tool for criminals selling endangered wild animals online, a new report claims.
“The world is facing an unprecedented biodiversity crisis in which species are disappearing at rates widely described as consistent with a sixth mass extinction,” the report released in April by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said.
“Facebook … is the central public infrastructure through which online wildlife trafficking is being concentrated, discovered and scaled,” claimed the report, based on two years of research.
Damages from the illegal wildlife trade “are measured in the loss of irreplaceable species such as elephants for their ivory, rhinos for their horns, pangolins for their scales, and countless parrots, primates, small mammals and reptiles for the exotic pet trade,” the report said.
Facebook, led by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, said its Restricted Goods and Services Policy prohibits content involving the trade in endangered and protected animals and plants. The policy also bans material that admits to or encourages poaching.
The company, owned by Meta, which made $60 billion in profit last year according to regulatory filings, did not directly dispute claims in the report that it hosted some 16,000 advertisements for illegally trafficked wildlife — about three-quarters of the total ads researchers identified — or that its algorithms and groups on its platform “are actively surfacing illegal content to users.”
Facebook also declined to say what it does to prevent illegal wildlife sales, how much of such content it has removed, or what consequences, if any, it imposes on accounts found to be illegally trafficking wildlife.
According to the report, the multi-country Global Monitoring System between April 2024 and March of this year identified about 22,000 ads for 267,000 wildlife products, involving about 8,500 live animals and about 258,000 items of animal meat, parts and extracts. Some 16,000 of the ads were on Facebook, about 74% of the total, the report said.
Nearly 60% of the illegal wildlife trade ads on Facebook related to endangered or critically endangered species, the report said.
The report includes screen shots showing three posts in a group called “pangolins and scales” from wildlife traders seeking to buy scales of the pangolin, a nocturnal mammal from Africa and Asia that is threatened with extinction and resembles a scaly armadillo. Also shown in the report is a screen-shotted complaint to Facebook about the group, and Facebook’s response that it didn’t remove the group because it “doesn’t go against our Community Standards.”
Vulnerable animals, already facing threats from climate change, pollution and development, are pushed “closer to extinction” by the illegal trade in wild animals, the report said.
The trade has moved from niche websites, chat rooms and bulletin boards into social media and online marketplaces that make it easier for buyers and sellers to connect, and “allow illicit transactions to begin in public before shifting to private channels,” the report said.
“Facebook leads in state-of-the-art technologies, including machine learning algorithms, that should be capable of detecting and removing wildlife trafficking content by filtering for keywords, using image recognition and blocking obvious code words,” the report said.
The report notes that Facebook is shielded by Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms from liability for content posted by users.
Most of the wildlife trade on Facebook is conducted in languages other than English, which receive less attention from content screeners, the report said.
“Moderation and monitoring capability must be multilingual to be effective at scale,” the report said. “Facebook’s enforcement actions have been sporadic and insufficient.”