Last Updated on December 30, 2019
Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, may have inadvertently been been assisting the global slave trad according to a new report from the United Nations.
Urmila Bhoola, UN Special Rapporteur tells the BBC News Arabic, “this is the quintessential example of modern slavery. Here we see a child being sold and traded like chattel, like a piece of property.”
There are many who believe that Instagram needs to be help responsible for the facilitating of such heinous crimes.
“In the Gulf, women employed as domestic workers are being sold online via apps approved and provided by Google and Apple,” the BBC Arabic team who posed as husband and wife investigating this online market of human slaves say in a video they released on Thursday.
“It’s been called an online slave market.”
The BBC Arabic team posing as a married couple used this cover to instigate and arrange meetings to provide substantial evidence of the guilt of these different accounts that participate in the trafficking of humans.
One particular lead brought them to Kuwait where they were to purchase a 16-year-old girl.
The girl who was called Fatou, had been brought from her home in Guinea, West Africa, and was arranged for sale for the cost of $3,800.
In repose, authorities in Kuwait claim to have issued arrests based on this evidence. It is unknown if suspects have been apprehended.
The Kuwait Authorities claim to have forced human trafficking Instagram account holders to sign a “legal agreement” where the promise to no longer sell humans as slaves.
As reported by Futurism, “the authorities told BBC News they also forced the account holders to take down their ads and sign a legal agreement promising to no longer ‘participate in this activity.’”
It is not known why a legal agreement is seen as sufficient repercussions for engaging in modern slave trade.
Instagram offers a similarly minimalist reaction to this heinous market that they have been allowing to function right under their noses.
UN Specialist Bhoola fights to point out that these stamens are meaningless to the fight against human trafficking, and demand more accountability from big tech who have true responsibility fro every victim that slipped through the cracks every minute that slave trade was allowed to be conducted on their platforms.
Bhoola says, “Google, Apple, Facebook, or any other companies [that] are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable,” she told BBC News Arabic.
“What they are doing is promoting an online slave market.”
Fatou, who has since been adopted by a family in her home country has been offered legal representation by international lawyer Kimberly Motel.
“On [the] Apple Store, they proclaim that they are responsible for everything that’s put on their store,” Motley told BBC News. “And so our question is, what does that responsibility mean?”
Motel is planning action against Instagram, alleging that the big tech platform allowed slave traders to operate on the site.
Meanwhile, Instagram has been seemingly focused on purging “dangerous” individuals from the platform, including American political candidate and reporter Laura Loomer, American radio and TV host Alex Jones, British journalist Paul Joseph Watson, and Canadian Censored.TV host Gavin McInnes.
