A BBC Arabic undercover team revealed in 2019 the existence of an online black market for maids in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The BBC team said online selling of domestic workers was done on Facebook and Instagram. Apps available on Google Play and Apple’s app store also promoted “maids for sale” ads. On the e-commerce web site and app 4Sale, for instance, women were categorized by race and sold for a few thousand dollars. Interviewing 4Sale users, the BBC team discovered that some of them can buy a maid for 600 Kuwaiti dinar ($2,000), and then sell her online for 1,000 Kuwaiti dinar ($3,300).
An article published by globalcitizen.org—Domestic Workers Are Being Illegally Sold on Social Media Apps—said that potential employers pay agencies a fee and become the official sponsor of a worker through the government. “Online employers have found ways to sell the sponsorship of their domestic worker to other employers, allowing buyers to bypass the agencies, making it easier to exploit vulnerable women.” Under the Kafala system, domestic workers cannot change their job or leave the country without their sponsor’s permission.
Anti-slavery advocates say the social-media companies must be held accountable. “What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,” Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, told the BBC team.
From globalcitizen.org: “Some 45 million people are trapped in modern slavery around the world. Globally, an estimated 71 percent of enslaved people are women and girls, while men and boys account for 29 percent. Women and girls who are trafficked face high rates of physical and sexual violence, as well as mental and physical health issues. Children who have been trafficked often end up missing out on their education and get stuck in a cycle of poverty and slavery.”
From the Associated Press: “Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the Mideast.
After publicly promising to crack down, Facebook acknowledged in internal documents obtained by The Associated Press that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on the social-media site of being abused. Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram remained in the app store.” (See, Apple once threatened Facebook ban over Mideast maid abuse, in the BusinessMirror, October 27, 2021).
The AP story is based on disclosures made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. A consortium of news organizations, including the AP, obtained the redacted versions.
“In our investigation, domestic workers frequently complained to their recruitment agencies of being locked in their homes, starved, forced to extend their contracts indefinitely, unpaid, and repeatedly sold to other employers without their consent,” one Facebook document read.
From the AP report: “In the documents seen by the AP, Facebook acknowledges being aware of both the exploitative conditions of foreign workers and the use of Instagram to buy and trade maids online even before a 2019 report by the BBC’s Arabic service on the practice in the Mideast. That BBC report sparked the threat by Cupertino, California-based Apple to remove the apps, citing examples of pictures of maids and their biographic details showing up online, according to the documents.”
The AP report said while Facebook disabled over 1,000 accounts on its web sites, its analysis papers acknowledged that as early as 2018 the company knew it had a problem with what it referred to as “domestic servitude.” It defined the problem as a “form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception.” The issue appeared a wide-enough problem that Facebook even used an acronym to describe it—HEx, or “human exploitation.” Facebook acknowledged it only scratched the surface of the problem and that “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”
When a company grows as big as Facebook courtesy of global users, it can’t afford to just “scratch the surface” of a problem that exploits people and puts them in grave danger. Facebook said in its statement to the AP that it delivers “targeted prevention and support ad campaigns in countries such as the Philippines where data suggests people may be at high risk of exploitation.” We are counting on Facebook to deliver on the things it said it would do. It has the power to help prevent human rights abuses and other forms of exploitation, like the online sale of domestic workers.