Facebook, Google, Apple promote slave trade apps

While we in the U.S. can’t stop talking about political ads on social media platforms, something arguably much more terrible is taking place on them. A special report out from BBC News Arabic has found that Instagram (owned by Facebook) and apps promoted by Google Play and the Apple App Store are home to a robust slave trade in Gulf countries.

The report focuses primarily on Kuwait, where 90 percent of homes “employ” a domestic servant. In reality, however, domestic workers are being bought and sold like chattel on apps and Instagram in what Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, called “an online slave market.” Sellers typically tell potential buyers to take away the women’s (and sometimes girls’) passports, lock them in the house, and not give them even a minute off. A policeman trying to sell his worker told undercover BBC journalists: “Trust me she’s very nice, she laughs and has a smiley face. Even if you keep her up till 5 a.m. she won't complain.” 

“This is the quintessential example of modern slavery,” said Bhoola. 

One app the journalists investigated, called 4Sale, filters women by race and price and offers commentary like, “African worker, clean and smiley,” or “Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off.” Another called Haraj is selling hundreds of women in Saudi Arabia.

It appears that none of the tech companies were aware of the extent—or even the existence—of this illegal trade in human beings. After BBC contacted Facebook, the company said it had banned an Arabic hashtag that means “#maidsfortransfer” and “will continue to work with law enforcement, expert organizations and industry to prevent this behavior on our platforms.” 

Google said it was “deeply troubled by the allegations.”

And while Apple said it “strictly prohibited” human trafficking and child exploitation in its promoted apps, it put the onus on the developers to eliminate the slave trade within: “App developers are responsible for policing the user-generated content on their platforms,” Apple told BBC. The company also said it would “work with developers to take immediate corrective actions” and, “in extreme cases, we will remove the app from the Store.”

In the meantime, the U.S.-based companies are still distributing the 4Sale and Haraj apps because “their primary purpose is to sell legitimate goods and services,” says BBC.

There have been a number of serious crimes against domestic workers reported in the last few years in Kuwait, where the workers make up two-thirds of the country’s population, according to Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain, a nonprofit based in Washington. The body of a Filipina maid named Joanna Demafelis, 29, was found in her employers’ freezer in early 2018, nearly a year after she first disappeared. In another 2018 case, an Ethiopian woman was beaten to death by her employer, likely because of her “lack of concern for the cleanliness of the house,” reported Arab Times, a free English-language daily in Kuwait.