"Slave markets found on Instagram and other apps," 31 Oct 2019

BBC News Arabic has found that domestic workers are being illegally bought and sold online in a booming black market.

Some of the trade has been carried out on Facebook-owned Instagram...

Other listings have been promoted in apps approved and provided by Google Play and Apple's App Store..

[Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery said] "If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable."...

Facebook said it had banned one of the hashtags involved.

Google and Apple said they were working with app developers to prevent illegal activity...

[BBC Arabic] spoke to 57 app users and visited more than a dozen people who were trying to sell them their domestic worker via a popular commodity app called 4Sale...

the investigation found hundreds of women being sold on Haraj, another popular commodity app...

Since the BBC team contacted the apps and tech companies about their findings, 4Sale has removed the domestic worker section of its platform.

There was no comment from the Saudi commodity app, Haraj.