PM:08:03:17/02/2022
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SULAIMANI — Yazidi activists and pro-bono lawyers in the US have put
together a 120-page report on social media companies’ failure to sufficiently
monitor and prevent the trafficking of Yazidi women by Islamic State (ISIS)
members on their platforms, Reuters said on Thursday (February 17).
The report accuses Big Tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube among
others, of not doing enough to prevent the trade of Yazidi women and girls who
were kidnapped by ISIS after the militant group seized control of Sinjar and
large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
The report states not enough was done to restrict hate speech against
Yazidis on social media platforms and calls for increased regulation. It also notes US authorities could aside to investigate and take legal action.
The document, according to Reuters, references a screenshot of social media
users bargaining over the price of a Yazidi woman.
An internal document from Facebook showed the company had almost no content
reviewers who were familiar with the Iraqi dialect of Arabic.
Meta, the parent organization of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has not
responded to the report, while YouTube said 250,000 videos were removed for
extremist content during a three-month period in 2021.
Activists say the social media platforms have been too slow to take action.
The Free Yazidi Foundation says more than 2,800 Yazidis are still unaccounted
for since they were captured by ISIS in 2014.
(NRT Digital Media)