Another Thing That Social Media Are Really Great For - Illegal Trade In Endangered Animals [View all]

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When the baby parrots were delivered to Alice Soares de Oliveira’s desk they had no feathers and could barely open their eyes. Housed in a dirty cardboard box, the pair were barely a month old, and showed signs of underfeeding. The parrots – along with a pair of young toucans that arrived just under a month later – were victims of wildlife traffickers. Snatched by poachers, perhaps from their mother’s nest, they were all advertised for sale on social media.

They were brought to Soares de Oliveira, a vet at CeMaCAS, a wildlife conservation centre in the forest outside Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, after being rescued by police monitoring networks on platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Social media has become a crucial tool for wildlife traffickers, experts say. A growing number use Facebook, for example, to advertise endangered animals or their byproducts for sale, often switching to messaging apps such as WhatsApp to complete the sale.

A report published in October by the Global Initiative Against Transnational and Organized Crime flagged 477 adverts for 18 protected species in Brazil and South Africa alone in a three-month period this year. Social media accounted for 78% of these. Simone Haysom, the Global Initiative’s director of environmental crime, says that after authorities cracked down on street markets, traders moved online. “Online spaces now provide the means for many of the world’s most endangered, most highly protected species to find consumers,” she says. “There is a cornucopia of endangered species available to buy online, and it simply shouldn’t be that easy.”

Crawford Allan, vice-president of nature crimes at the World Wildlife Fund, says the pandemic led to wildlife crime becoming “systemised” online. “A lot of the open markets were closing,” he says. “People couldn’t move around and so a lot of stuff ended up online, and it’s become a norm.” Social media companies face challenging circumstances in determining whether such adverts are illegal, as laws on the sale of wild animals differ by jurisdiction and species. Nevertheless, experts say tech firms need to do more to determine when posts have a high risk.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/09/inside-the-illegal-wildlife-trade-booming-on-social-media-aoe