Wall Street Journal: CJNG Using Facebook To Publish Execution Videos & Recruit But Facebook Rarely Takes Down Pages

Journalists Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz published an article in the US news publication the Wall Street Journal on September 16, 2021 which describes, in part, how the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) has Facebook accounts which recruit new members and share torture/execution videos, however even when the pages are reported, the pages are rarely ever taken down. 

The following is a selection of some of the relevant excerpts related to cartels, taken directly from the original article which was written by Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz. 

In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called “learnings.” The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men.

The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting on Facebook or Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing site.

Facebook removes some pages, though many more operate openly, according to the scores of internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In some countries where Facebook operates, it has few or no people who speak the dialects needed to identify dangerous or criminal uses of the platform, the documents show.

When problems have surfaced publicly, Facebook has said it addressed them by taking down offending posts. But it hasn’t fixed the systems that allowed offenders to repeat the bad behavior. Instead, priority is given to retaining users, helping business partners and at times placating authoritarian governments, whose support Facebook sometimes needs to operate within their borders, the documents show.

The documents reviewed by the Journal are reports from employees who are studying the use of Facebook around the world, including human exploitation and other abuses of the platform. They write about their embarrassment and frustration, citing decisions that allow users to post videos of murders, incitements to violence, government threats against pro-democracy campaigners and advertisements for human trafficking.

Some of the most serious issues flagged by the documents are overseas. Activists have complained for years that Facebook does too little to protect overseas users from trouble it knows occurs on its platform. The documents show that many within Facebook agree.

“In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact checkers to keep people safe,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said this week.

‘Not enough’

The ex-cop and his team untangled the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s online network by examining posts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as private messages on those platforms, according to the documents. (Messages on WhatsApp, another Facebook product, are encrypted by default.)

The team identified key individuals, tracked payments they made to hit men and discovered how they were recruiting poor teenagers to attend hit-man training camps.

Mexican police attend a ceremony to honor colleagues killed by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in 2015.

Facebook messages showed recruiters warning young would-be hires “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp,” the former officer wrote.

The cartel, which law-enforcement officials say is the biggest criminal drug threat to the U.S., didn’t hide its activity. It had multiple Facebook pages with photos of gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes, the documents show.

The Facebook pages were posted under the name “CJNG,” widely known as the shorthand for Cartél Jalisco Nueva Generación, even though the company had internally labeled the cartel one of the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” whose pages should have been automatically removed from the platform under Facebook policy.

A January 2021 internal report titled 'Understanding the Intersection between Criminal Organizations and Human Trafficking’

The former cop recommended the company improve its follow-through to ensure bans on designated groups are enforced and seek to better understand cartel activity. Facebook didn’t fully remove the cartel from its sites. The documents say it took down content tied to the cartel and disrupted the network.

The investigation team asked another Facebook unit tasked with coordinating different divisions to look at ways to make sure a ban on the cartel could be enforced. That wasn’t done effectively either, according to the documents, because the team assigned the job didn’t follow up.

On Jan. 13, nine days after the report was circulated internally, the first post appeared on a new CJNG Instagram account: A video of a person with a gold pistol shooting a young man in the head while blood spurts from his neck. The next post is a photo of a beaten man tied to a chair; the one after that is a trash bag full of severed hands.

The page, along with other Instagram and Facebook pages advertising the cartel, remained active for at least five months before being taken down. Since then, new pages have appeared under the CJNG name featuring guns and beheadings.

The former officer declined to comment on his findings, and Facebook declined to make him available for an interview. Facebook said this week its employees know they can improve their anti-cartel efforts, and that the company is investing in artificial intelligence to bolster its enforcement against such groups.

Facebook commits fewer resources to stopping harm overseas than in the U.S., the documents show.

In 2020, Facebook employees and contractors spent more than 3.2 million hours searching out and labeling or, in some cases, taking down information the company concluded was false or misleading, the documents show. Only 13% of those hours were spent working on content from outside the U.S. The company spent almost three times as many hours outside the U.S. working on “brand safety,” such as making sure ads don’t appear alongside content advertisers may find objectionable.

For the full text please see the source at: The Wall Street Journal