Items offered for sale on Facebook in Libya also included much of the other equipment sought by militias or terrorists for their operations. Social Media Pages Help Armed Groups Find Other Military Equipment “We urge everyone who sees violations to report them to us,” she said.ĩ.
Christine Chen, a Facebook spokeswoman, said the company relied on the nearly 1.6 billion people who visit the site every month to flag offenders. In all four countries, government forces do not control large areas of territory and civil society is under intense pressure. This trafficking occurred in countries where the Islamic State is at its most active and where armed militias or other designated terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have a persistent presence. Several groups from which the photographs for this article were downloaded operated on Facebook for two years or more, accumulating thousands of members before Facebook announced its ban on arms sales. How effective the policy is, in practice, is unclear. In this way so-called Community Operations teams - Facebook employees who review the reports in dozens of languages - can examine and remove offending content. Bickert said the most important part of Facebook’s effort “to keep people safe” was to make it easy for users to notify the company of suspected violations, which can be done with a click on the “Report” feature on every Facebook post. Facebook Relies on Users to Report the Arms Trafficking It Bans An old system, SA-7s are a greater threat to helicopters and commercial aircraft than to modern military jets.ĥ. ARES said it documented Libyan sellers claiming to have two complete SA-7s for sale, two additional missiles and three gripstocks. Many of these left Libyan state custody in 2011, as depots were raided by rebels and looters. Last year ARES said it had documented an offer on Facebook to sell an SA-7 gripstock (pictured above), the reusable centerpiece of a man-portable antiaircraft defense system, or Manpads, a weapon of the Stinger class. The report documented 97 attempts at unregulated transfers of missiles, heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets and anti-matériel rifles, used to disable military equipment, through several Libyan Facebook groups since September 2014.
Among the weapons displayed have been heavy machine guns on mounts that are designed for antiaircraft roles and that can be bolted to pickup trucks, and more sophisticated and menacing systems, including guided anti-tank missiles and an early generation of shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles. Many sales are arranged after Facebook users post photographs in closed and secret groups the posts act roughly like digital classified ads on weapons-specific boards. The Weapons Have Included Heavy Machine Guns and Heat-Seeking Missiles
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