Allowing Illegal Actions for Ads

• Facebook did not take action against human trafficking groups that were on their platform despite being made aware of their presence. A Polish trafficking expert said that he had identified human trafficking on Facebook, but 18 months later there had been no implementation of systems to find and remove trafficking posts.
• Facebook in fact allowed the human traffickers to spend $152,000 on Facebook ads for massage parlors and deactivated a system that detected human trafficking networks on their platform
• Facebook’s policies prohibited employment ads from offering free travel and the covering of visa expenses, but such ads were still able to be published on the platform
• At times, Facebook held back from reforming the negative aspects of its platform over fears that it could hurt their business
• Facebook chose not to fully remove accounts linked to the drug cartel, ‘Jalisco Nueva Generacion’, after an employee brought the accounts to attention. The employee had just untangled the cartel’s activities throughout the platform by reviewing their private messages and public posts
• Facebook did designate the cartel as one of the “dangerous individuals and organization” on their platform. This designation should have led to the cartel’s posts being automatically removed, but they weren’t. An internal investigation team at Facebook had asked another team to make sure that a ban on the cartel was enforced, but that team did not follow up on the job
• The cartel posted graphic images of murder, torture and severed limbs, yet Facebook didn’t take action against them for 5 months. 9 days after Facebook became aware of the cartel’s presence on their platform, the cartel created a new Instagram account and posted videos of instances of people being shot in the head, bags of severed hands and torture.
• Despite the clear violation of the platform’s rules, the cartel’s Instagram account remained active for at least 5 months before being taken down