Greg's Corner

Facebook accused of not doing enough to stop the deaths of migrants

In the recent past, Facebook has been criticized for allowing human rights abuses to have taken place in countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and The Philippines. In many of these cases, human rights organizations have criticized Facebook for not doing enough to stop abuses from happening but Facebook tends to give the rationalizations of the inflammatory content either doesn’t violate their community guidelines or claiming they’re doing all they can. Now, Facebook is being accused of not helping to stop the deaths of migrants trying to escape to Europe.

Since 2015, refugees from countries in the Middle East and Africa have been fleeing their countries either due to internal violence or human rights abuses. While the number of migrants has decreased since then, 700 refugees have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in dangerously overcrowded vessels. The UK’s National Crime Agency claims that a large part of the problem is illegal smugglers advertising their services on Facebook. Tom Dowdall, deputy director of the NCA says Facebook has the technology to stop these smugglers from posting but doesn’t do enough to prevent them from posting.

Facebook have developed a fantastic ability to be able to identify patterns and how everybody operates on a day to day basis.

“This is no different: there will be patterns that are developed here which we know that Facebook and others can be onto really quickly. We need their cooperation to be able to identify and to either close down these sites or be able to further investigate them.”

Once again, this another example of Facebook’s power and reach getting out of their own control. Since Facebook wants to be all things to all people they can’t seem to grasp that a lot of those people use their platform to do horrible things. It isn’t enough anymore for Facebook to just throw up their hands and say “they’re trying”. They need to start policing themselves before the governments of the world start doing it for them.