Social-Media
Facebook is suppressing evidence of war crimes, analysts say.
An art dealer in Darnah, Libya, posted a series of unusual advertisements on October 24, 2020. For sale: a Greco-Roman statue, a toga-covered marble bust. If it looked like it belonged to a museum, that's because it did. The vendor has shared images of the piece in private Facebook groups devoted to antiquities trafficking.
The black market for stolen goods is booming on Facebook. Although the company prohibited the selling of historic objects in June, many of the posts are in Arabic, and Facebook lacks the experience to fully implement its new policy.
If Facebook is able to recognise groups who do not meet its rules, experts say the company simply delete them, releasing valuable documents for scholars researching stolen art. This is critical evidence for repatriation efforts and war crimes, says Katie Paul, co-director of the Athar Project. Facebook has created a problem, and instead of turning it into something they could contribute to, they're making it worse.
The consequences go far beyond theft of art. Since 2014, stolen antiques have been a significant source of funding for terrorist groups such as ISIS. The Middle East is rich in cultural objects, and the market for stolen goods is not as regulated as drug trafficking and weapons sales.
The seller of the Greco-Roman statue has posted an ad in Facebook groups of between 5,000 and 18,000 participants. Traffickers live there stream their looting operations, give each other tips on digging and seeking buyers for parts that are still on the ground. Athar is currently tracking 130 anti-trafficking organisations.
A community of 340,000 members in Syria has posts showing looters uncovering a mosaic. In the comments, Athar reported one user saying that the mosaic should not be removed, while another replied with laughing emojis saying, Death of hunger for the history of the country.
The issue is especially serious in active conflict zones where trafficking in antiquities is a war crime. It's furious and problematic, says Samuel Hardy, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute in Rome who specializes in cultural heritage and conflict. When Facebook draws evidence that people are self-publishing, we lose not only the ability to track cultural property and return it to the victimized community, but also any hope of identifying and stopping the criminals who make money from it.
Facebook isn't the only site that's grappling with how to police content while maintaining facts for study groups like Athar. YouTube has also attracted criticism of the removal of terrorist material that scholars are attempting to analyze. Although both firms often hold evidence at the request of law enforcement, most academic researchers are not supported by this policy.
We're not saying that all this content must remain public forever, said Jeff Deutch, a researcher at the Syrian Archive, in connection with videos of human rights abuses. But it is important that this content is archived so that it is accessible to researchers, human rights groups, academics, lawyers, for use in some kind of legal accountability.
The problem has been around on Facebook for years. Those who were seeking to research the company's ad targeting tools were also irritated by their inability to share data with academics.
In the case of art smugglers, Facebook's emphasis on privacy has had unintended benefits, because criminals use hidden groups and encrypted messages to undertake illegal activity. This in turn, has made Facebook the wild west of social media, providing opportunities for violent extremist organizations and criminal groups to operate in plain sight with little recourse, Athar wrote in his study.
Facebook was not going to comment on the record for this article.
Photo credit should read ARUN SANKAR/AFP via Getty Images used on this news.
