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Saturday, September 18, 2021

Wall Street Journal: CJNG Using Facebook To Publish Execution Videos & Recruit But Facebook Rarely Takes Down Pages

Journalists Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz published an article in the US news publication the Wall Street Journal on September 16, 2021 which describes, in part, how the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) has Facebook accounts which recruit new members and share torture/execution videos, however even when the pages are reported, the pages are rarely ever taken down. 

The following is a selection of some of the relevant excerpts related to cartels, taken directly from the original article which was written by Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz. 



In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called “learnings.” The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men.


The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting on Facebook or Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing site.


Facebook removes some pages, though many more operate openly, according to the scores of internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In some countries where Facebook operates, it has few or no people who speak the dialects needed to identify dangerous or criminal uses of the platform, the documents show.


When problems have surfaced publicly, Facebook has said it addressed them by taking down offending posts. But it hasn’t fixed the systems that allowed offenders to repeat the bad behavior. Instead, priority is given to retaining users, helping business partners and at times placating authoritarian governments, whose support Facebook sometimes needs to operate within their borders, the documents show.


The documents reviewed by the Journal are reports from employees who are studying the use of Facebook around the world, including human exploitation and other abuses of the platform. They write about their embarrassment and frustration, citing decisions that allow users to post videos of murders, incitements to violence, government threats against pro-democracy campaigners and advertisements for human trafficking.


Some of the most serious issues flagged by the documents are overseas. Activists have complained for years that Facebook does too little to protect overseas users from trouble it knows occurs on its platform. The documents show that many within Facebook agree.


“In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact checkers to keep people safe,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said this week.




‘Not enough’


The ex-cop and his team untangled the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s online network by examining posts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as private messages on those platforms, according to the documents. (Messages on WhatsApp, another Facebook product, are encrypted by default.)


The team identified key individuals, tracked payments they made to hit men and discovered how they were recruiting poor teenagers to attend hit-man training camps.


Mexican police attend a ceremony to honor colleagues killed by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in 2015.

Facebook messages showed recruiters warning young would-be hires “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp,” the former officer wrote.


The cartel, which law-enforcement officials say is the biggest criminal drug threat to the U.S., didn’t hide its activity. It had multiple Facebook pages with photos of gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes, the documents show.


The Facebook pages were posted under the name “CJNG,” widely known as the shorthand for Cartél Jalisco Nueva Generación, even though the company had internally labeled the cartel one of the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” whose pages should have been automatically removed from the platform under Facebook policy.


A January 2021 internal report titled 'Understanding the Intersection between Criminal Organizations and Human Trafficking’

The former cop recommended the company improve its follow-through to ensure bans on designated groups are enforced and seek to better understand cartel activity. Facebook didn’t fully remove the cartel from its sites. The documents say it took down content tied to the cartel and disrupted the network.


The investigation team asked another Facebook unit tasked with coordinating different divisions to look at ways to make sure a ban on the cartel could be enforced. That wasn’t done effectively either, according to the documents, because the team assigned the job didn’t follow up.


On Jan. 13, nine days after the report was circulated internally, the first post appeared on a new CJNG Instagram account: A video of a person with a gold pistol shooting a young man in the head while blood spurts from his neck. The next post is a photo of a beaten man tied to a chair; the one after that is a trash bag full of severed hands.


The page, along with other Instagram and Facebook pages advertising the cartel, remained active for at least five months before being taken down. Since then, new pages have appeared under the CJNG name featuring guns and beheadings.


The former officer declined to comment on his findings, and Facebook declined to make him available for an interview. Facebook said this week its employees know they can improve their anti-cartel efforts, and that the company is investing in artificial intelligence to bolster its enforcement against such groups.


Facebook commits fewer resources to stopping harm overseas than in the U.S., the documents show.


In 2020, Facebook employees and contractors spent more than 3.2 million hours searching out and labeling or, in some cases, taking down information the company concluded was false or misleading, the documents show. Only 13% of those hours were spent working on content from outside the U.S. The company spent almost three times as many hours outside the U.S. working on “brand safety,” such as making sure ads don’t appear alongside content advertisers may find objectionable.


For the full text please see the source at: The Wall Street Journal

12 comments:

  1. Facebook was quick to ban BB about 2 years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Facebook banned Donald Trump,Alex Jones,or anyone that calls out the lefties on their lies,corruption and hypocrisy..but the taliban can post beheadings and also recruit 🤔 hmmmm..the world is really upside down

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ….. You must’ve missed all the lies and disinformation the right has been rampantly and disingenuously spreading since covid and before.

      Delete
    2. You must’ve missed all the lies the right has been rampantly and disingenuously spreading since covid and before.

      Delete
    3. That’s a matter of opinion, you can take your mainstream COVID propaganda and flush it .. but both sides are no good, it’s kinda like cartel cheerleading. What gangsters do you support? Maybe stick to futbol people, leave the tribal fighting there

      Delete
    4. Cody you seem to be a trump nuthugger.

      Delete
    5. Cody I regret to inform you that D. Trump lost the election big time, nevertheless the sore loser circumvented lies that people believed, he has no chance what so ever in running again. He can have you believing snake oil cures Cancer, when we all know the truth.

      Delete
    6. 9:08 Not long ago, significant Republicans with influence begged Democrats to stop airing their dirty linen, Democrats answered they would stop airing the true corruption of the republicans if they would stop inventing lies about democrats.
      Republicans answered with packs of lies, but nothing like the Unpresidented Disgrace and oringe agent COVID 19's 40 000 lies in 4 years...
      Both sides lie?
      That is just one more extreme rightist elephant sized lie you can't compare to the ant sized donkey lies...
      Public opinion sent the Donal' back to his florida swamp.

      Delete
    7. All you useful idiots ain't looking at the bigger picture..Divide and conquer is a old tactic while they destroy your rights and your country..Donald is all part of the shit show and is in cahoots with the globalist elite to create division among the citizens and have us fighting each other,while the true enemies are laughing at all of us..democrats and Republicans are 2 sides of the same coin..and you useful idiots look away the CJNG and Taliban platforms on social media beheading and recruiting terrorists..but orangeman bad lol I'm an independent,and there's corruption on both the left and the right..but the lefties are bringing in communism basically for the whole planet and the globalist like the Rockefellers,Rothschilds,Vatican got there puppets controling everything..the medical tyranny we see going on is only the beginning..any of you useful idiots ever heard of the Nuremberg code?

      Delete

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