By Toby McIntosh
Social media companies may have slowed down in the fight against illegal wildlife trafficking online, according to a numerical hint dropped by the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online.
The rate at which of illegal wildlife trafficking postings have been blocked has dropped about 9 percent over the past three years, according to an analysis of numbers in a “Progress Report” issued in December by the Coalition.
The Coalition was formed by three major non-profit groups and social media companies to facilitate cooperative efforts to fight illegal wildlife trafficking (IWT) online and grew to more than 40 members. The Coalition has helped the companies identify illegal activity, conducted trainings and collected data from members. (See 2022 EYE article.)
The one-page Progress Report, only the second one issued, says: “24.1 million prohibited wildlife listings and suspected illicit sellers blocked from March 2018-Sept 2024.”
New Data Shows Decline in Blocking Ads
Eye on Global Transparency compared the data in the two reports, converting it to monthly terms. The numbers suggest a reduction in the rate of taking endangered species listings online.
The 2021 report said that during the Coalition’s first three years members “removed or blocked” 11,631,819 endangered species listings. That’s a monthly average of 323,000.
The new report shows that over the six and a half year history of the Coalition, so the monthly blocked average was 309,000.
Isolating the last 3.5 years (12,468,181 blocking actions) shows a lower monthly average of 297,000.
In percentage terms, the monthly number of blocked postings declined by 9.1 percent between the two reporting periods.
The new information may be subject to many caveats and explanations, but the Coalition provided no commentary and officials did not reply to requests for interviews.
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‘Much more can be done’
Recent public statements by Coalition officials indicate both that they are pleased with the efforts by social media companies, but also that they think much more should be done.
“Companies need to allocate far more resources towards regulating how users trade illegally in wildlife parts and derivatives on their platforms,” according Richard Scobey, executive director of Traffic, one of the three NGO members of the Coalition, quoted in a December Guardian article.
Further, he said, “Social media companies are working to combat the illegal trade on their platforms…. But much more can be done.”
Similar comments came from by Crawford Allan, VP Nature Crimes and Policy Advocacy at the World Wildlife Federation, another key Coalition member.
“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,” according to the Guardian article.
“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,” Alan added.
But Allan urged more action, telling the Guardian: “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.”
Praising Meta
The Coalition’s work with Meta was the subject of an August 2024 article by the WWF’s Allan and Conor Sanchez, Meta’s Content Policy Engagement Manager, a laudatory summary of their cooperation.
Allan and Sanchez wrote that Meta through its participation in the Coalition, “has leaned into an industry-wide and cross-sector approach to tackling this issue.”
They said the Coalition “supports the tech sector to (1) harmonize prohibited content policies, (2) train company moderators to identify prohibited content, (3) encourage users to report suspicious posts, (4) incorporate known tactics and search terms into AI block filters, (5) and at the core, share learning with other companies to accelerate impact.”
“Through this approach,” according to the article, “WWF and Meta have worked together” on a number of fronts. They “regularly review monitoring data and incorporate insights surfaced by WWF and TRAFFIC experts into Meta’s AI models to more accurately identify prohibited wildlife trade at speed and scale.”
Other Coalition efforts include training Meta moderators “to identify policy-violating content on Facebook and Instagram,” according to the joint article.
“Despite rapidly evolving tactics by traffickers to avoid detection, these counter-efforts are working.” the article states, previewing the Coalition overall blockage figure (slightly lower at the time) that the Coalition announced in December.
“Content moderation continues to rely on a combination of technology and human review to remove violating content,” the authors wrote. “We are excited that advances in AI technology have greater potential to advance efforts to protect endangered wildlife globally from online trafficking.”
The article disclosed that Meta removed 7.6 million pieces of wildlife-related content in 2023, a bit of data not included in Meta’s quarterly transparency reports. No other annual Meta data was provided.
The joint article was written before Meta in December said it will stop using third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram (only in the US for the moment) and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. EYE sought comment from Meta on whether this would affect its work on IWT.
Magnitudes of IWT Sales Online Unknown
Considerable research continues to document sales of wildlife online, but there is no definitive data on the total number of overall postings and or volume of sales, or trends.
Nevertheless, the pattern is clear enough that WWF said in March 2024, “Online platforms are now the dominant market for the trafficking of live wildlife for exotic pets and wildlife products, the second most significant threat to endangered species after habitat loss.”
The Coalition’s latest data, combined from statistics provided by its members, offers a peephole into whether IWT online is being reduced. But the absence of more periodic data makes it hard to gauge the performance of social media companies, and the Coalition. The Coalition receives data from the member companies, but issues it only in aggregated form and, so far, at three year intervals. The social media companies all have policies forbidding IWT, but do not make public data on anti-IWT activity.
Early in its existence, the Coalition dropped as unmeasurable its initial pledge to reduce online IWT by 80 percent by 2020.
The apparent drop in blocking IWT listings could be explained by factors such as variations in the definitions of what is measured and in the number of companies reporting data. However, the Coalition’s short progress report provides no such discussion. EYE reached out to officials of the three member NGOs without success.
The progress report sums up some other elements of Coalition activity. It says that 40,000 “search terms” have been shared with companies and law enforcement “to enhance automated detection.” In addition, “3,050 online company staff have been trained in prohibited wildlife detection.”
The progress report includes short statements from five members, two of which include numbers. A summary by eBay says it “blocked 500,000+ violations in 2023 by employing multiple approaches, including block filters, manual site reviews and new AI models that utilize image and text analysis.”
A Traffic announcement in September 2024 said it and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are working with eBay “to develop a blueprint for its own and other platforms to strengthen online trading policies for the sale of plants and prevent illegal sales.”
And a statement from Baidu cites its “AI Guardian of Endangered Species” developed with IFAW that “has successfully screened over 360,000 images and led to deletion of 7,863 illegal postings.”
An improved version of the Baidu/IFAW tool was announced in November 2024 in a press release stating, “It has an average accuracy rate of 86% in detecting illegal wildlife trade products online and submitting them for prosecution.” It also said, “IFAW is currently developing a user interface which allows enforcers and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to easily use the AI Guardian 2.0 to identify images and listings of their target wildlife and products.”
An official of another Coalition partner, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence to identify illegal sales in a 2023 blog post, but did not discuss how much or how well social media companies are using AI.
New Effort to Document Trends of IWT Online
A new initiative to discover trends is ECO-SOLVE, funded by the EU and started this year by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). It aims to identify “the number of adverts found, the numbers and types of species advertised and the number of platforms that host these adverts.”
ECO-SOLVE in June of 2024 issued its first report, Monitoring Online Illegal Wildlife Trade. The trends may appear over time.
“The ease with which illegal advertisements can be found online reflects the high level of impunity (and the low level of risk) enjoyed by those engaged in the trade,” the report says, continuing, “A significant hindrance in combating this crime is the dearth of data regarding the scale of the market, its dynamics, modus operandi and resultant consequences, especially on a global scale.”
In one attempt to evaluate the marketplace. GI-TOC conducted a systematic literature review of publications about IWT online released between 2017 and 2024. “The findings revealed that for the seven years of the review, five CSOs and nine academic institutions conducted monitoring efforts resulting in 33 studies with the identification of a total of 103,491 suspicious adverts selling endangered species, averaging 14,784 per year, or approximately 41 suspicious adverts per day.” But the count “is likely to be an underestimate,” GI-TOC said, citing a variety of factors.
The report pointed out there is very limited government regulation targeting online sales. It criticized the Coalition for not being transparent and said there was little evidence of action by the members.
A 2020 study by the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO) said Facebook “failed to keep its promise.”
Reports and Studies Continue to Document Online Sales
The 2024 UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) World Wildlife Crime Report concludes that “wildlife trafficking overall has not been significantly reduced in two decades,” and now affects more than 4,000 animal and plant species from 162 countries and territories.
Monitoring online sales provides “snapshots,” not comprehensive information, according to the report, which states:
For some commodities and locations additional information emerges through monitoring online and physical markets, but this is seldom systematic and long-term. Like seizures, such observations give a snapshot of the occurrence of certain wildlife goods at some point along the market chain, rather than a comprehensive indication of the illegal flow.
One such snapshot is a research report issued in late 2024 by Traffic, done with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) that “uncovered an alarming breadth of online adverts offering illegal wildlife products for sale in Vietnam.”
The survey revealed an average of 30 daily advertisements for illegal wildlife products, with Facebook and Zalo identified as the primary platforms for this trade. Tiger products, elephant ivory, rhino, and pangolin products topped the list of advertised items.
The top conclusion says, “Social media and e-commerce companies should enhance their monitoring capabilities, train staff, and implement stricter policies against posts enabling illegal wildlife trade.”
A June 2024 study by Traffic focused on South Africa found advertisements on major online retailers such as 21Food and Alibaba “that seemingly lacked the required documentation for the species for sale.”
Another Traffic report, from March 2024, said that “70% of the burgeoning online trade in Cheetahs is happening on social media.
A report published in October of 2024 by the Global Initiative Against Transnational and Organized Crime flagged 477 advertisements for 18 protected species in Brazil and South Africa alone in a three-month period this year. Social media accounted for 78% of these.
A 2024 IFAW report, Wildlife Crime in Hispanic America, states: “Illegal online wildlife trade has reportedly increased exponentially in Hispanic America. However, online wildlife traffickers appear to be operating with near impunity, as most Hispanic American countries reported very few—if any—seizures of wildlife that was offered for sale online.”
“It seems likely that the limited enforcement success in the fight against illegal online wildlife trade is related to a lack of capacity and/or expertise to monitor the web and conduct online investigations,” the report found, adding, “However, some countries are seen to be increasing their efforts.”
Data from online marketplaces across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany in 2023 was covered in another IFAW 2024 repot, The Elephant in the Net: Research snapshot of the online ivory trade after the adoption of the new EU rules. More recently, in May, the IFAW praised praised the Digital Services Act adopted in 2022 by the European Union, saying it “could significantly help protect wildlife in the digital age.”
Academic researchers continue to scrape the web looking at IWT online, publishing papers such as this one about reptile sales in Australia.
Other researchers are looking for ways to identify IWT online, for example in this article: Detecting wildlife trafficking in images from online platforms: A test case using deep learning with pangolin images. It begins, “E-commerce has become a booming market for wildlife trafficking, as online platforms are increasingly more accessible and easier to navigate by sellers, while still lacking adequate supervision.”
Journalists Write About Online Sales
Journalists continue to report about IWT online. Some recent examples:
How Facebook Contributes to the Demise of Endangered Species, by Marina Wang
‘It shouldn’t be that easy’: inside the illegal wildlife trade booming on social media, by Sam Meadows
Illegal wildlife trade ‘thriving’ in virtual world; NParks monitoring marketplaces, by Zaihan Mohamed Yusof
No signs of slowdown in wildlife trafficking in 2024 as demand persists, by Keith Anthony Fabro
Wildlife Traffickers Reveal Tricks of Their Illegal Trade, by Maureen O’Hagan
Illegal wildlife trafficking thrives in Facebook groups for “animal lovers, by Tonggo Simangunsong
