Attachments
By Mohammad Al-Abbas
INTRODUCTION
Technological innovation, particularly in the telecommunication sector, has been a driving force for change in society – and its criminal underworld. Social media has been routinely used to recruit victims of human trafficking. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, human traffickers have adapted their business model to online trends and are “taking advantage of online technologies for every step of their criminal activities.” Especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly aggressive tactics have been used by human traffickers to the point where a UN rights committee had to call upon technology companies to help eliminate trafficking on their platforms. Just in the United States in 2020, over 40% of victims in federal sex trafficking cases were recruited online, with 59% of those victims being recruited on Facebook. No reliable statistics are available about the use of social media for labor trafficking recruitment or for human trafficking outside of the United States.1 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. One such example is the 2019 BBC report on Instagram slave markets and other social media platforms in Kuwait and the Gulf Region. In these markets migrant workers, often women, are actively sold and purchased as domestic workers under the Kafala system. Additionally, some academics have begun to investigate the role of social media platforms in facilitating the abuse of domestic workers and one study illustrated social media’s role in brokering the sale and purchase of domestic workers both regionally and domestically.
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, and closed Facebook groups, this brief focuses on public auctions held on Twitter.