Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the West Asia.

After publicly promising to deal with the issue, Facebook acknowledged in internal documents obtained by The Associated Press (AP) that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on Facebook of being abused. Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram remained in the app store.

But, Facebook’s crackdown seems to have had an expiry date. Even today, a quick search for “khadima,” or “maids” in Arabic, will result in accounts featuring posed photographs of Africans and South Asians with ages and prices listed next to their images. 

While West Asia remains an important source of work for women in Asia and Africa hoping to provide for their families back home, Facebook acknowledged some countries across the region have “especially egregious” human rights issues when it comes to the protection of laborers.

One of the Facebook documents mentions "In our investigation, domestic workers frequently complained to their recruitment agencies of being locked in their homes, starved, forced to extend their contracts indefinitely, unpaid, and repeatedly sold to other employers without their consent. In response, agencies commonly told them to be more agreeable."

The report added: “We also found recruitment agencies dismissing more serious crimes, such as physical or sexual assault, rather than helping domestic workers.”

Facebook told the AP that it took the problem seriously, despite the continued spread of ads exploiting foreign workers in West Asia. 

This is one of the stories disclosed by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower, Frances Haugen's legal counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress.

The documents show that Facebook's daunting size and user base around the world also prove to be its greatest weakness in trying to control illegal activities, such as drug dealing and suspected human rights and labor abuses on its site.

The executive director of Equidem Research, which studies migrant labor, Mustafa Qadri reasons "While Facebook is a private company, when you have billions of users, you are effectively like a state and therefore you have social responsibilities de facto, whether you like it or not." 

“These workers are being recruited and going to places to work like the Gulf, the Middle East, where there is practically no proper regulation of how they’re recruited and how they’re treated when they end up in the places where they work. So when you put those two things together, really, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Mary Ann Abunda, who works with a non-governmental Filipino workers’ welfare group called Sandigan in Kuwait, warned likewise of the danger the site can pose.

“Facebook really has two faces now,” Abunda said. “Yes, as it advertises, it’s connecting people, but it has also become a haven of sinister people and syndicates who wait for your weak moment to pounce on you.”

Facebook pointed to the “kafala” system widespread across much of the region’s countries. Under this system, workers find their residency bound directly to their employer, their sponsor, or “kafeel.”

While workers can find employment in these arrangements that allow them to send money back home, deceitful sponsors can exploit their laborers who often have no other legal recourse. Stories of workers having their passports seized, working non-stop without breaks, and not being properly paid long have shadowed major construction projects, whether in Dubai’s Expo 2020 or Qatar’s upcoming FIFA 2022 World Cup.

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The Gulf Arab states like the UAE and Qatar insist they have improved their working conditions; however, others like Saudi Arabia still require workers to get their employers' approval for leaving the country. Meanwhile, maids and domestic workers can find themselves even more at risk by living alone with families in private homes.

The documents received by AP show that Facebook admits being aware of both the exploitive conditions of foreign workers and the use of Instagram to buy and sell maids online even before a 2019 report by BBC Arabic on the practice in West Asia. The BBC report sparked the threat by California-based Apple to remove the apps. Apple said it "strictly prohibited" the promotion of human trafficking and child exploitation in apps made available on its marketplace.

Facebook engineers found links to maid-selling sites predominantly affecting Facebook. Over 60% of the material came from Saudi Arabia, according to the 2019 Facebook analysis.

In a statement to the AP, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development said the kingdom “stands firmly against all types of illegal practices in the labor market” and that all labor contracts must be approved by authorities. While keeping contact with the Philippines and other nations on labor issues, the ministry said Facebook had never been in touch with it about the problem.

It is true that Facebook disabled over 1,000 accounts on its websites, but its analysis papers acknowledged that as early as 2018, the company knew it had a problem with what it referred to as “domestic servitude.” It defined the problem as a “form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception.”

The issue appeared to be a wide-enough problem that Facebook even used an acronym to describe it — HEx, or “human exploitation.” Facebook acknowledged it only scratched the surface of the problem and that “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”

After a week, Facebook shared what it had done and Apple apparently dropped the threat. Apple did not respond to requests for comment, but Facebook acknowledged how seriously it took the threat at the time.

“Removing our applications from Apple platforms would have had potentially severe consequences to the business, including depriving millions of users of access,” the analysis said.

The problem, however, continues today across both Facebook and Instagram - Facebook appears to acknowledge that in more recent documents seen by the AP. It described engineers accessing problematic messages in maid-recruiting agencies’ inboxes, including one in which a Filipina specifically is mentioned as being “sold” by her Kuwaiti employers.

“Sometimes my head and ears hurt from being hit,” another batch of messages from a Filipina in Kuwait read. “When I escape from here, how will I get my passport? And how can we get out of here? The door is always locked.”

Another Filipina housemaid in Kuwait, who described being “sold” to another family through an Instagram post in December 2012, told the AP that she knew of other cases of Filipinas being “traded online like merchandise.”

“I was like an animal that was being traded by one owner to another,” said the woman, who spoke from Kuwait on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. “If Facebook and Instagram won’t take stronger steps against this anomaly, there will be more victims like me. I was lucky because I did not end up dead or a sexual slave.”

Authorities in Kuwait did not respond to requests for comment. It is worth mentioning that the Philippines temporarily banned domestic workers from going to Kuwait after an abused Filipina was found dead in a refrigerator in 2018 over a year after disappearing.

Facebook suggested a pilot program supposedly to start in 2021. The program targets Filipinas with pop-up messages and banner ads warning them about the dangers working overseas can pose.

It remains unclear whether the said program ever began, though Facebook said in its statement to the AP that it delivers “targeted prevention and support ad campaigns in countries such as the Philippines where data suggests people may be at high risk of exploitation.” Facebook did not answer specific questions posed by the AP about its practices.

That leaves some of the most desperate job seekers in the world susceptible to promises and possible trafficking on Facebook.

“We’ve seen since the pandemic that these low-wage workers who literally raise our children, they build our buildings, they cook our food, they deliver our meals. They’re not just low-wage workers, they’re essential workers,” said Qadri, the migrant rights expert. “So we really have a duty to address these problems because our entire civilization is dependent on these people.”