Facebook is Breaking Rule Zero of the Internet
What’s the difference between Tiger King and Facebook?
One is a shitshow teeming with drugs, violence and animal abuse that’s benefiting from a pandemic to increase its popularity.
The other is a Netflix series.
Like millions of other Americans, I have taken refuge from the cacophony of scary COVID-19 news by binging on Joe Exotic’s sordid underworld of tigers, meth, and mullets.
Through seven episodes of “extreme” storytelling that is often more sensational than substantial, one solid fact does emerge: dodgy exotic cat parks in the U.S. — now home to more tigers than exist in the wild — rely on their vast social media followings to stay in business.
Joe Exotic, the antihero and fashion risk-taker of the series, depended on a YouTube channel for income. Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, unlikely chick-magnet and founder of The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, proudly tells the camera, “Our social media these days is in the millions … [because] … our content is so unique.” This comes as he’s filming a staged “birthday party” to be broadcast online featuring endangered chimpanzees tearing apart store-bought party hats and blowers.
Every bit of content they create, each more outrageous than the last, is asking: what do you think of that? And hoping you’ll click “like.”
Doc Antle and Joe Exotic aren’t genius pioneers in recognizing that outrageous material drives up social media engagement. To maximize profits, Facebook and other social media firms have developed algorithms optimized to make outrageous content go viral.
At a time when the Coronavirus has killed tens of thousands in real life, it’s pertinent to have a discussion about how “going viral” in cyberspace can also result in harmful consequences. Here’s an example: the more users engage with sleazy exotic animal parks online, the more social media firms will gear their algorithms to promote them, in order to boost their own profits. This, in turn, will incentivize even more outrageous content, at the expense of innocent animals.
In the opening scene of another binge-worthy Netflix series, social media sleuth Deanna Thompson describes the seedy underbelly of the Internet as a lawless realm of sex, violence and depravity. Even in the darkest of places, there is one inviolable law, Rule Zero, as she calls it: “Don’t fuck with cats.”
But as Tiger King has begun to expose, Deanna Thompson is wrong. People are fucking with cats (and other animals) all over the Internet, and especially on social media. The content that made you cringe on Tiger King — think of the scene where Joe Exotic drags a newborn tiger pup away from his mother with a metal hook — is just the tip of a very deep, dark iceberg.
Facebook, for example, has a stated policy prohibiting content featuring acts of physical harm committed against animals. The firm also bans the sale of endangered species or their parts, as well as staged animal fights. But no one thinks Facebook is doing a good job of enforcing its community standards.
At the Alliance to Counter Crime Online, we are tracking hundreds of private groups on Facebook platforms where buyers and sellers are actively trading exotic pets, ranging from cheetahs and apes to Komodo dragons and baby tigers. The animals are often kept or transported in hideous conditions that are definitely dangerous to them, and which may also pose risks to human health.
One of our members, Lady Freethinker, has identified more than 150 Facebook groups — the top five have upwards of 160,000 members — promoting or screening videos of illegal dog fighting. Posts may feature dogs mauling each other, chained up in factory-like training facilities, or displaying the telltale scars and open wounds of dog fighting. Unscrupulous breeders also use the platform to sell helpless puppies bred from fighting “champions,” shipping the dogs worldwide to face torture and death.
We have interviewed Facebook moderators, who have detailed secret Facebook groups where members gather to share live and recorded video feeds of animal torture. The horrifying material they describe makes Luka Magnotta, the sociopath in Don’t Fuck with Cats, seem mild in comparison.
I’m talking about videos where children are forced to have sex with farm animals, where dogs and cats get lit fireworks inserted in their mouths, or kittens have their faces chopped off with hatchets.
What do you think of that? Would you click “like” on animal torture?
Because the fact that some people do is actually what drives creation of this sick content.
“What a lot of people don’t understand,” one former moderator told me, “is that most material uploaded onto Facebook is original.” And since the vast majority of it occurs in private groups, most of us never see it. Like COVID-19, this viral content spreads invisibly. But unlike a biological virus, there are ways of tracing and eradicating it quickly, only Facebook doesn’t do it.
The firm makes tall claims about comprehensively removing some types of toxic content, such as child sex trafficking and abuse material and ISIS propaganda. But current and former Facebook officials have told us that the firm makes little effort to remove animal torture content.
The Alliance to Counter Crime Online has been calling out Facebook and other social media companies to better enforce their policies towards animal content, and we’re pushing for reform to a U.S. law that currently absolves tech firms of liability for hosting criminal content.
Because if it’s illegal to do it in real life, it should be illegal to host it online.
When Facebook and other social media firms refuse to stop the spread of dangerous viral content, they become like the governments that waited too long to institute stay at home measures to contain COVID-19. Like government officials who prioritized the economy over public welfare, these social media firms are prioritizing profits over safety.
Which brings us back to Rule Zero: Don’t fuck with cats. Joe Exotic got 22 years in jail, in part for killing Tigers. Facebook — so far — has faced nothing.
What do you think of that?
Gretchen Peters is Executive Director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online.
