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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.
The Global Initiative uses a mixture of AI techniques and human analysis to detect suspicious adverts online. Their flagging system, part of a project called Eco-Solve, covers Brazil, South Africa and Thailand, and will soon expand to India, Indonesia and the UAE.
Richard Scobey, executive director of Traffic, an organisation focused on wildlife trafficking, says that advertising on social media often allows sellers to “circumvent” legislation and sell items without telling buyers their origins.
“Companies need to allocate far more resources towards regulating how users trade illegally in wildlife parts and derivatives on their platforms,” he says. “Social media companies are working to combat the illegal trade on their platforms … But much more can be done.”
Some tech firms have taken steps to combat the issue. In 2020, Facebook introduced a tag to some search terms, warning users of the dangers of wildlife trafficking, and Meta removed 7.6m posts in 2023, according to the Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking Online.
The coalition is a voluntary body, which includes most of the leading US and Chinese social media companies.
In 2021, it said that 11.6m posts had been blocked or removed by members.
The WWF’s Allan was a founding member of the coalition and continues to oversee its work. He says that tech firms have been receptive to activists’ attempts to get them to crack down on activity, but that layoffs in the industry have affected progress.
“As a conservation group, we always feel that people need to do more, but we also understand that they’re dealing with terrorism, child safety, with all the ills of the world that are flowing through their social media channels. They’ve got much bigger, scarier issues to deal with,” he adds.
“We feel some companies have found the balance. There’s also companies that haven’t. They’re not doing enough, or they’re on hiatus for some reason, and they need to step up and do more.”
A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, says: “We do not allow activity related to the purchase, sale, raffle, gift, transfer, or trade of endangered and protected species on our services.
“We use a combination of technology, reviews by our teams and user reports to identify activity that breaks our terms of service and we will respond to valid requests from law enforcement.”
Wildlife trafficking threatens biodiversity and can drive the extinction of certain species. According to a 2023 article in Forensic Science International, approximately 5,209 animal species are threatened or near-threatened due to “use and trade”.
Haysom says: “These species [being advertised for sale online] are protected because they’re endangered. They’re protected because trade poses a real threat to their continued existence.”
In São Paulo, Soares de Oliveira sees a bright future for the birds in her care. Vets at CeMaCAS care for hundreds of birds and animals at a time. She is confident that the parrots and toucans will make a full recovery and be released back into the wild.
“They are in the rehab process. They are still young and we are observing them. But in three months, I think they can have a free life,” she says.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage.
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