Facebook Breaks Its Own Rules On Animal Cruelty and Trading
Some posts advertise puppies that had been sired by champion fighters. Others show dogs chained up in compounds. There are images of dogs mauling each other, displaying telltale scars and open wounds. Many posts boast about how many fights the featured dog has won. Even though dogfighting is a felony crime in all 50 U.S. states, it is easily found on Facebook.
ACCO expert Nina Jackel is a global activist exposing cruel and illegal animal activities through undercover operations, investigative reports and online campaigns. Through her nonprofit media organization, Lady Freethinker (LFT), she and her team have been able to collect more than 15 million signatures compelling governments and law enforcement to end animal cruelty.
In her investigation, The Deadly Underground World of Dogfighting on Facebook, Jackel presents evidence that Facebook has epicly failed to enforce its own policies against animal cruelty and the sale of animals by letting dofighters promote their activity globally.
Between October 2018 and February 2019, LFT’s investigator tracked more than 50 Facebook pages and groups that posted dogfighting-related content, and found that the top five groups alone had more than 160,000 followers clicking through upwards of 2,000 posts explicitly promoting dogfighting or trafficking dogs for fighting.
LFT investigators also discovered that many of the pages and groups used coded terminology to describe dogfighting. For example, a “grand champion” would be described as “Gr Ch with five wins” or a promoter would reference the box the dog fights in as “4x4.” Once Facebook algorithms identified commonly used terms associated with dogfighting, the platform often “suggested” other groups that also promoted dogfighting.
Utilizing the existing Facebook policies as guidelines, LTF reported 26 posts that were in violation of Facebook’s own community standards. However, Facebook only removed 6 of the posts, and instead, urged the investigators to block, unfriend or unfollow the posts that they declined to remove that “may still be offensive or distasteful.”
Because of a quarter-century-old law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Facebook is not liable for hosting criminal content uploaded by its users. Because of this blanket immunity - and since removing content negatively affects profits - Facebook is not methodical about creating procedures to identify, remove and report content that features or facilitates illegal activity.
In other words, Facebook may ban animal cruelty, but it doesn’t enforce its own rules. Rather, its own algorithms help perpetuate violent criminal acts against innocent animals.
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