Report: Human smugglers increasingly use Facebook to advertise services on the US-Mexico border

Human smugglers are increasingly utilizing Facebook to advertise services to migrants seeking to cross the US-Mexico border, according to a report released Friday by a tech transparency group.

The influx of migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, at the US southern border has overwhelmed the government's resources in the last month and posed a steep challenge for the Biden administration. The administration has also been up against human smugglers who in some cases have marketed their services on Facebook, a platform critics say has failed to uphold its content moderation commitments. Of the 50 Facebook pages identified in the Tech Transparency Project report, more than half were created since mid-November and of those, a dozen popped up in the last month. Most pages used descriptors like "coyote," a commonly used term used for human smugglers, to signal the service being offered. Pages were also sometimes categorized as "travel company" or "product/service."