GOP Representative Accuses Facebook of Promoting Human Smuggling Amid Border Crisis
Soon after Democratic US President Joe Biden was sworn in, the US-Mexico border saw an unprecedented amount of migrants trying to enter the United States in search of a better life, apparently inspired by the Biden administration's softer immigration policy.
GOP Representative Kat Cammack penned a concerned letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of encouraging and advertising human smuggling on his social media platform amid the border crisis the US has been facing recently.
"Instead of censoring conservatives, how about we take on the cartels? In my letter to Facebook, I attached screenshots of ads I personally found w/a simple search for passage to the United States. Their role in the crisis at the border is urgent & must be addressed immediately", Cammack tweeted Wednesday.
In a letter obtained by Fox News, Cammack calls on Facebook to take measures against human smuggling advertisements, while pointing at what she described as "silencing" and "shadow-banning" conservative voices.
"I take issue when Facebook and other social media platforms actively silence conservatives and "shadow-ban" individuals with views that are not supported by employees of your company", the letter states. "However, Facebook's role in the crisis at the border is urgent and must be addressed immediately".
Cammack provided screenshots from a Facebook search which reportedly show ads promoting "passage to the United States", claiming in her letter that at least 50 pages on the platform offer "illegal crossing" services.
Instead of censoring conservatives, how about we take on the cartels? In my letter to Facebook, I attached screenshots of ads I personally found w/a simple search for passage to the United States. Their role in the crisis at the border is urgent & must be addressed immediately. https://t.co/cl6czQ4VIo
— Kat Cammack (@Kat_Cammack) May 5, 2021
"Attached to this letter are screenshots from my phone of Facebook pages I was able to find by simply searching for the terms "Cruze frontera a EUA" or "Viajar a Estados Unidos". Even more troubling was the fact that as people visited these pages, myself included, that Facebook then provided additional posts and pages of related illegal content", the Republican representative wrote.
A Facebook spokesperson told Fox News that the company is reviewing the content that Cammack offered.
"We prohibit content that offers or assists with human smuggling and remove it from our platform whenever we find it. We are reviewing the content that was highlighted to us," Fox News quoted the spokesperson saying.
Zuckerberg said during a hearing last month that smuggling ads are against Facebook's policies, and the company is "taking a lot of steps to stop it." He also described the situation on the US-Mexico border as "really serious" and said that "we're taking it very seriously."
Cammack's concerned letter comes shortly after a Facebook Oversight Board upheld the platform's ban on the former US president, Donald Trump, immediately causing an uproar among the conservatives, who again slammed big tech companies for what they describe as the suppression of free speech.
Criticism that mainstream social media platforms are "silencing" conservative voices emerged long before the Trump ban, as many Republicans lament that Twitter and Facebook use "shadow-banning" against prominent conservative figures.
Responding to the GOP accusations, a Twitter statement noted that the company does not "shadow-ban".
"We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and shipping a change to address this. The profiles, Tweets and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them. To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of Tweets", Twitter asserted in a 2018 statement cited by CNBC.
The former president was permanently banned from most mainstream social media platforms after being impeached by the US House a second time due to "incitement of insurrection", although the GOP-controlled US Senate voted a second time to acquit Trump.