Facebook ‘is luring migrants to deaths’

FACEBOOK has been accused by one of Britain’s top law enforcement officials of “luring migrants to their deaths” by failing to block advertisements from human traffickers on its site.

Tom Dowdall, deputy director of the National Crime Agency, said that officers had found more than 800 Facebook pages that were linked to organised crime gangs that smuggle people into Europe illegally in exchange for financial gain.

These pages included adverts for “vessels, documents and transport services” and instructions on where to meet to find boats that could take them across the sea.

“They are being lured to their deaths using an application that they are using every day of the week,” Mr Dowdall told the Evening Standard.

“The technology exists with big providers like Facebook and others to develop the right algorithms... to identify what look like risky pages. They are not stepping up in the way we would want.”

The Nca-led Project Invigor, the UK’S Organised Immigration Crime task force, which targets the criminal networks behind people smuggling, is also looking at the use of social media to make it more difficult for these criminal gangs to target people. “The internet companies which host and often make a profit out of these platforms need to do more to identify and stop them being exploited by criminal gangs,” said Chris Hogben, the Project Invigor head.

A Facebook spokesman stated that any posts, pages or groups that coordinate people smuggling activity are not allowed on the global social networking site.

“We work closely with law enforcement agencies around the world including

‘The technology exists with big providers to develop the right algorithms... to identify what look like risky pages’

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,” the spokesman said.

So far, 1,514 migrant deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean this year, with 87,629 known attempted crossings made.