Apple once threatened Facebook ban over Mideast maid abuse

Sign advertising jobs for domestic helpers in the Mideast

By JON GAMBRELL and JIM GOMEZ

Associated Press

Oct. 25, 2021 7:15 AM PT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns that the platforms were being used to trade and sell maids in the Mideast.

After publicly promising to crack down, Facebook acknowledged in internal documents that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on the social media network of being abused. Apple relented, and Facebook and Instagram remained in the app store.

But Facebook’s crackdown seems to have had a limited effect. Even today, a quick search for “khadima,” or “maids” in Arabic, will bring up accounts featuring posed photographs of Africans and South Asians with ages and prices listed next to their images. That’s even as the Philippine government employs a team of workers who do nothing but scour Facebook posts each day to try to protect desperate job seekers from criminal gangs and unscrupulous recruiters using the site.

While the Mideast remains a crucial source of work for women in Asia and Africa hoping to provide for their families back home, Facebook acknowledged that some countries across the region have “especially egregious” human rights issues when it comes to laborers’ protection.

“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. “In response, agencies commonly told them to be more agreeable.”

The report added: “We also found recruitment agencies dismissing more serious crimes, such as physical or sexual assault, rather than helping domestic workers.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, Facebook said it took the problem seriously, despite the continued spread of ads exploiting foreign workers in the Mideast.

“We prohibit human exploitation in no uncertain terms,” Facebook said. “We’ve been combating human trafficking on our platform for many years, and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from having a home on our platform.”

This story is based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including the AP.

Taken as a whole, the trove of documents shows that Facebook’s daunting size and user base around the world — a key factor in its rapid ascent and near-trillion-dollar valuation — also proves to be its greatest weakness in trying to police illicit activity, such as the sale of drugs and suspected human rights and labor abuses on its site.

Activists say Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has both an obligation and likely the means to fully crack down on the abuses that its services facilitate as it earns tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue.

“While Facebook is a private company, when you have billions of users, you are effectively like a state, and therefore you have social responsibilities de facto, whether you like it or not,” said Mustafa Qadri, the executive director of Equidem Research, which studies migrant labor.

“These workers are being recruited and going to places to work like the Gulf, the Middle East, where there is practically no proper regulation of how they’re recruited and how they’re treated when they end up in the places where they work. So when you put those two things together, really, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Mary Ann Abunda, who works with a nongovernmental Filipino workers’ welfare group called Sandigan in Kuwait, similarly warned of the danger that the site can pose.

“Facebook really has two faces now,” Abunda said. “Yes, as it advertises, it’s connecting people, but it has also become a haven of sinister people and syndicates who wait for your weak moment to pounce on you.”

Facebook, like human rights activists and others worried about labor across the Mideast, pointed to the so-called “kafala” system prevalent across much of the region’s countries. Under this system, which allowed nations to import cheap foreign labor from Africa and South Asia as oil money swelled their economies beginning in the 1950s, workers find their residency bound directly to their employer, their sponsor or “kafeel.”

While workers can find employment in these arrangements that allow them to send money back home, unscrupulous sponsors can exploit their laborers, who often have no legal recourse. Stories of workers having their passports seized, working nonstop without breaks and not being properly paid have long shadowed major construction projects, including those associated with Dubai’s Expo 2020 or Qatar’s upcoming FIFA 2022 World Cup.

While Gulf Arab states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar insist they’ve improved working conditions, others like Saudi Arabia still require employers to approve their workers’ leaving the country. Meanwhile, maids and domestic workers can find themselves even more at risk by living alone with families in private homes.

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. That BBC report sparked the threat by Apple to remove Facebook and Instagram from its app store, citing examples of pictures of maids and their biographic details showing up online, according to the documents.

Facebook engineers found that nearly three-fourths of all problematic posts, including showing maids in videos and screenshots of their conversations, occurred on Instagram. Links to maid-selling sites predominantly affected Facebook.

More than 60% of the material came from Saudi Arabia, with about one-quarter coming from Egypt, according to the 2019 Facebook analysis.

In a statement to the AP, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development said that the kingdom “stands firmly against all types of illegal practices in the labor market” and that all labor contracts must be approved by authorities. While keeping in contact with the Philippines and other nations on labor issues, the ministry said Facebook had never been in touch with it about the problem.