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March 8, 2022

The Honorable Lance Gooden

1722 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable Mary Miller

1529 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Representatives Gooden and Miller,

Thank you for your letter regarding human trafficking and human smuggling. We appreciate the
opportunity to address these issues and highlight our work in this important area. We have been
working diligently to proactively remove content that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling on
our platforms.

We strongly oppose the abuse of our apps to facilitate any form of human trafficking, slavery, servitude,
forced or compulsory labor, and all other trafficking-related activities. We prohibit content that offers to
provide or facilitate human smuggling and remove it when detected from our platform. We have
longstanding policies and protocols to combat human trafficking and smuggling abuses, and want our
users to have a positive and safe experience on our platforms.

In recent years, the world has faced the largest global refugee crisis since World War II - with millions
displaced due to war, famine and persecution, including religious. As a global company serving as a
platform for voice and connection for billions of people worldwide, we craft policies that balance
freedom of expression with safety. If activities related to these issues come onto our platform, we
consult experts and stakeholders to understand the trade-offs of different approaches, knowing these
are complex issues for which there are no easy answers.

Meta’s Policies Prohibiting Human Trafficking

As a general matter, content is allowed on Meta’s platforms unless the content violates a specific policy.
Facebook’s Community Standards govern what content may not be posted on the Facebook platform
across the globe. In May 2019, after consulting with third-party experts, academics, and practitioners
from around the world, Meta consolidated multiple related policies into a Human Exploitation (“HEx”)
Policy.1 The policy consolidation was consistent with the advice Meta received from these individuals
and groups, who encouraged Meta to address a broad range of harmful and exploitative activities
through one comprehensive human exploitation policy.

Meta prioritizes the safety of people who use our platforms and recognizes that it is important to
protect individuals’ rights to seek asylum while minimizing the risks of being exploited by human
traffickers. As has been the case since 2019, Meta’s policy is to remove content that offers to provide or
facilitate human smuggling. However, we do not remove content seeking information on how to cross
borders. That policy reflects our conclusion that the best way to help people stay safe is to allow people

1
Meta’s Human Exploitation Policy is available at https://transparency fb.com/policies/community-
standards/human-exploitation/.
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to ask for help in crossing borders. Even without necessity for coercion or force, human smuggling may
still result in the exploitation of vulnerable individuals who are trying to leave their country of origin,
often in pursuit of a better life.

We remove content on Facebook and Instagram that facilitates or coordinates the exploitation of
humans, including human trafficking. Meta defines human trafficking in our Community Standards as
the “exploitation of humans in order to force them to engage in commercial sex, labor, or other
activities against their will. It relies on deception, force and coercion, and degrades humans by
depriving them of their freedom while economically or materially benefiting others.” Meta adapted the
definitions of human trafficking and human smuggling from the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and
Punish Trafficking in Persons (“Palermo Protocol”) and Protocol Against Smuggling of Migrants. Human
trafficking is a crime against a person, which relies on exploitation and can happen with or without
movement, whereas human smuggling is a crime against a state, relying on movement.

Meta recognizes that sharing and obtaining information concerning how to cross a border is key to
exercising one’s right to seek asylum. With its policy, Meta intends to prohibit content relating to the
business of human smuggling but not interfere with people’s ability to exercise their right to seek
asylum, which is recognized by international and U.S. law.

Human smuggling can only be tackled with strong dedicated efforts amongst policymakers, civil society,
academia, law enforcement and companies—so we work closely with experts and support education
initiatives. Importantly, we do not develop our policies alone. We rely on expertise of our policy team,
other relevant teams at Facebook, and external voices—our community, experts and organizations
outside of Facebook such as academics, safety and human rights NGOs, activists, organizations focused
on curtailing illegal immigration and securing America’s borders, and organizations focused on the plight
of persecuted religious minorities—to make sure we understand different perspectives on safety and
expression, as well as the impact of our policies on different communities globally. Over time, we may
receive additional feedback from those sources as the global landscape changes, and we also gain
insights from our Global Operations team, research teams, and other internal voices. That input helps us
continually refine our policies.

Meta’s Efforts to Detect and Remove Violating Content

Our practices and policies recognize that human trafficking and human smuggling are a serious problem
that require a multifaceted approach across different teams at Meta. Human exploitation practices are
global and societal issues that require knowledge of local contexts. We employ local market experts to
understand, identify, and surface trafficking trends on the platform and train our cross-functional teams
to recognize them. For example, we have market specialists who conduct reviews of content in Latin
America to identify posts and Groups that violate our human trafficking policies. And we have members
of teams across investigations, engineering, research, content policy, and business integrity who work
on our anti-trafficking efforts.

We look to enact countermeasures—both on our platforms and via our external partnerships—to stop
actors and businesses from using our services to commit crimes, and in all stages of the exploitation
lifecycle. However, this is an adversarial space, and although we have tools to combat recidivism, we do
find these organizations try to return to our platforms.
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Meta uses a variety of tools to disrupt criminal organizations, including designation under our dangerous
organizations policies, conducting human review, and employing a wide range of artificial intelligence
(AI) and network disruptions. Meta relies on people and technology to remove this content, and works
with NGOs and other stakeholders to combat ways our platforms may be used by those who want to
harm people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our enforcement so we can most
effectively find and remove content that breaks our rules.

We support our ability to detect violating content related to human exploitation through major
investments by our technical and operational teams. We are always looking for ways to do more, which
is exactly why we hire specialists in key fields to help us research and understand the problems so we
can continue to improve our technology, staffing, and policies to address them. These teams of experts
help us uncover patterns of harmful behavior so we can disrupt it. They have helped us to find and
disrupt gangs and traffickers operating on our platforms.

Within Meta, we assess whether or not an account is posting content that may aim to recruit into,
coordinate, or exploit people for the purpose of domestic servitude or other forms of exploitation. We
work to have a continuous feedback loop between our moderators and language specialists who identify
new adversarial terms, hashtags, and tactics on our platforms to our policy and technology teams. We
continually seek to expand and refine our understanding of human exploitation as we amend and
update our enforcement guidelines.

We work with law enforcement around the world to help keep our community safe, both on and offline.
This sometimes means providing information that will help them respond to emergencies, including
those that involve the immediate risk of harm, such as those related to human exploitation. We also
work with organizations around the world to provide resources and support for victims and survivors of
human trafficking, and we direct people to expert organizations like Polaris and the National Human
Trafficking Hotline. Our Help Center Page also provides our community with information on how to
report human trafficking-related content on the platforms. In collaboration with our Safety partners, we
share contact details of over 20 local, regional and global anti-trafficking organizations, including Polaris
and the National Human Trafficking Hotline, to provide resources and assist victims and survivors of
human trafficking. We work continually to update and expand the Help Center Page.

Conclusion

There is no place on Meta's platforms for human exploitation activities. We continue to work on
improving these areas, including identifying and strengthening ways in which we can combat human
trafficking. We appreciate your interest in this issue. To the extent they exist, many of the documents
requested in your letter are kept confidential, in part to promote full and frank discussion within Meta
about important issues like this and to preserve users’ and employees’ privacy. Other documents, such
as law enforcement requests, may be confidential as a matter of law.

Sincerely,

Meta Platforms, Inc.