Facebook ‘helps lure migrants to death’ by hosting smuggler ads

FACEBOOK is helping people smugglers to lure migrants ‘to their deaths’ in the Mediterranean, Britain’s top law enforcement agency warned yesterday.

The National Crime Agency said the tech giant was failing to stop adverts being posted by criminals on the social network offering boats, transport services or documents to help facilitate the dangerous crossing from North Africa to Europe.

Tom Dowdall, the NCA’s deputy director, said migrants were often recruited through Facebook.

He told the Evening Standard yesterday that migrants were being ‘lured to their deaths using an application that they are using every day of the week.’

Mr Dowdall added: ‘Since December 2016, we have identified over 800 Facebook pages which we consider as being associated with organised immigration crime. That is largely offering vessels, documents, transport services. There is enough we are seeing to indicate to us that it supports criminality.

‘We have a problem here which we need to address. We just haven’t had enough willingness yet. The technology exists with big providers like Facebook to develop the right algorithms... to identify what look like risky pages. They are not stepping up in the way we would want.’

Some pages give instructions on where to meet to board dangerous boats, on which hundreds of migrants have drowned this year.

Earlier this year, the Mail revealed how Facebook was being used to peddle black market passports. The revelations follow previous outrage about the social media behemoth being used as a platform for terror videos.

The firm has faced a backlash for its handling of fake news and privacy, and last month shares tumbled by more than 20 per cent after Facebook’s revenue and user growth fell short of investor expectations.

The firm, alongside other social networks, has faced criticism before over failures to deal quickly with extreme or terrorist content on its pages.

In a report earlier this year by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, MPs said, despite some progress, the ‘biggest and richest social media companies are shamefully far from taking sufficient action to tackle illegal and dangerous content’ and accused them of being ‘completely irresponsible’ in their failure ‘to abide by the law, and to keep their users and others safe’.

Mr Dowdall, who leads the NCA’s fight against human trafficking and modern slavery, said it referred each suspect page it found to the EU’s crime-fighting body, Europol, to help its inquiries into people smugglers.

He said the pages were then taken down, but too slowly, and said Facebook should do more to stop the adverts appearing in the first place.

Facebook insisted the company was taking the problem seriously. A spokesman said: ‘People smuggling is illegal and any posts, pages or groups that co-ordinate this activity are not allowed on Facebook.

‘We work closely with law enforcement agencies around the world, including Europol, to identify, remove and report this illegal activity, and we’re always improving the methods we use to identify content that breaks our policies, including doubling our safety and security team to 20,000 people and investing in technology.’

Last year, a Daily Mail investigation uncovered brazen ‘stowaway selfies’ posted on Facebook to advertise illegal Albanian people smuggling into Britain.

Pictures of young people hidden in lorries were uploaded on pages including ‘Albanians in London’, alongside the caption: ‘On the way.’

Other images offering fake IDs and charges for booking a place with a smuggler proved how gangs of people-traffickers were using social media to cash in.

Facebook boasts of the Albanian crime gangs From the Mail, November 25