"Platforming Human Trafficking: Tweeting Human Auctions in the Middle East", 22 February 2023

INTRODUCTION

The Center for International Policy’s Global Social Media Harms Tracker has aggregated harms propagated or facilitated by social media platforms in the Global South. The tracker uncovered a disturbing trend of slave markets and human trafficking on social media within the MENA region.

This phenomenon of selling and trading migrant workers within the MENA is not new. Rather, it has existed as long as the Kafala system has with most sales conducted by socalled “recruitment agencies.” However, social media has allowed sellers to bypass agencies, and created an “unregulated black market which leaves women more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.”

This brief sets out to investigate the current state of human auctions on social media. While these markets are prolific on almost all platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp, andclosed Facebook groups, this brief focuses on public auctions held on Twitter.

TWITTER’S HUMAN AUCTIONS

Locating accounts auctioning domestic workers was not difficult. Many of these accounts employ marketing tactics similar to those of large companies.

The posts advertising these auctions are standardized and systematic.

DISCUSSION

These auctions undermine decades of human development and are signs of moral bankruptcy, but they are not illegal.

Perhaps more of the burden of regulation should fall onto the social media platforms themselves. The culpability of Twitter in the matter of slave markets and human trafficking on their own platform is significant. Twitter has routinely failed to moderate foreign languages, particularly Arabic. Accounts engaging in these slave markets are using the same distinguishable hashtags to market themselves, making identifying them much easier. Yet Twitter has continued to aid and abet these slave markets through their inaction. Social media companies like Twitter have a vast amount of resources at their disposal and are well-positioned to fight human trafficking on their platforms. However, social media companies have repeatedly failed in the past.

As both regional governments and social media companies are unwilling to regulate human auctions, this creates a protection gap that has and will likely continue to allow the proliferation of human auctions shown above... However, a common denominator of these social media platforms is their country of origin: they are all U.S.-based companies and would be held liable if national regulation was to assign them some level of accountability. Regulations could be put in place to stop companies from knowingly assisting, facilitating, or supporting human trafficking in the form of auctions both nationally and internationally.