Social Media and Human Trafficking: The Big Story

Julie Okah Donli

The business of human trafficking generates an estimated USSB15B profit globally, hence it is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. The use of social media has greatly increased in the 21st century.

Aided by technological innovations, social media is not just a means of socializing and chatting, it is now a multi-billion-naira industry that is capable of changing almost everything about the world.

Gone are the days when people use social media only for the purposes of posting pictures and garnering hundreds of likes and comments, these days, people own virtual shops, sell all sorts of things online and cash out big time.

It is not only legitimate business owners that cash out, criminals have also tapped into the opportunities provided by social media to perpetrate crimes. Kidnappers have used the social media to monitor their victims and even to trace them to their schools, homes and offices.

Scammers and swindlers have also hacked into many accounts to defraud people of their hard-earned money. The issue of cloned accounts with fake identity is also a cause for alarm.

One of the crimes that has taken a different form through the use of social media is human trafficking. As I have maintained in previous editions, human trafficking is a very sensitive issue and combating it demands a holistic approach. To effectively combat this crime, one has to be proactive and proactiveness is one of my watchwords.

Undercover investigations have revealed that there are several dimensions of human trafficking in the social media. Firstly, the use of social media influencers to advertise products and services.

I have discovered that some trafficking syndicates pose as legitimate merchants of products and services and then pay social media influencers to advertise such non-existent products.

These influencers who are mostly after money do not verify the authenticity of these products and services but plunge right ahead to make advertising posts and because of the trust their followers have for them, they call to patronize the vendors and the gullible ones fall into the net of the traffickers.

Also, social media has no way of verifying intending users before assigning them accounts. All you need to open an account in almost all the social media platforms these days is a functioning phone number, email and a data connection.

So, it is possible for a trafficker to open multiple accounts posing as religious leaders, psychologists, politicians or any public figure. Once they do this, they begin to work on gaining the trust of thousands of followers for themselves and then they map out plans to traffic unsuspecting victims under the umbrella of helping their followers find greener pastures abroad.

This process does not end with creating fake accounts alone. Some traffickers also create cloned social media pages and groups using the names of popular public and private firms, government and nongovernmental organizations.

One ugly trend that is trailing the end SARS protest is the craze to run away from the country and this has given birth to different travel agent groups on social media. Some of these groups pay heavily to put up adverts on blogs.

Many youths who are obsessed with the idea of greener pastures abroad rush to contact these so-called easy visa and travel agents and they end up in the hands of traffickers.

Unsupervised access to social media by parents and guardians is a factor that is making the job of traffickers easy on the net. Many young people spend hours on social media chatting with unknown people with little or no supervision from their parents.

Sometimes, these traffickers pose as youths and use fake profile pictures to deceive young people into accepting their so-called offer of greener pastures.

Tackling the menace of social media and human trafficking is not an easy one because the flexible nature of social media makes it tricky. First of all, most traffickers upload fake names and photos and as such you do not even know who to go after.

You could spend several weeks and even months going after an alleged trafficker only for you to realize that the original owner of the name and picture is a law-abiding citizen of this country who has no idea that his/her name or image was being used to perpetuate crime. This brings you back to square one and the endless cycle of tracking criminals after wasting time, money and energy.

The fact that merely putting up a disclaimer on a social media advert post is enough to exonerate the media influencer, group or blog is another clog in the wheel of this fight. When things go sour and you approach these people, they are quick to show you the disclaimer and walk comfortably out of the net.

Raising alarms concerning the activities of traffickers through the use of popular social media figures, pages and blogs is not an easy task as most of them fight back by influencing their followers to tag and report your account which could subsequently lead to your suspension from such media platforms.

Calling for a regulation on social media rules and engagement is often greeted with so much suspicion and criticism. Many people interpret such intentions as an infringement on their fundamental human right of freedom of speech.

There is the need to therefore apply the use of technology in tackling this crime from the social media angle. These and more shall be published in subsequent publications of my diary. Stay glued to this column.

Dame Julie Okah Donli is the new chair of the board of trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons (UNVTF). She was until December 2020, the Director-General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).