The Telegraph has quoted an unnamed source close to British Home Secretary Priti Patel as saying that social media platforms, including Facebook, add to endangering migrants' lives as they are giving a helping hand to people smugglers.
"They are hiding behind semantics. This is content that is aiding and abetting criminals to smuggle people across the borders and they need to take it down. These smugglers are responsible for these crossings and the dangers that sit with them", the source claimed.
It added that social media companies' failure to remove this content is "hampering law enforcement in doing their jobs stopping these people making crossings" and that "by leaving this content on their platforms, they are putting people's lives at risk".
The remarks came after the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) accused Facebook and YouTube of rejecting NCA's appeals to remove hundreds of posts that promote smuggling services or to block end-to-end encryption aimed at preventing interception of migrant boats by police.
Rob Jones, director general of threat leadership for the NCA, told MPs from the Home Affairs Committee that in the first five months of this year, the agency referred more than 1,200 pages related to organised immigration crime to social media firms for closure.
"Now, of those, 578 were closed and 485 were rejected as not breaching terms and conditions. We were very certain when we made these referrals that there was a problem with those accounts. To see that level of attrition with not all those accounts being closed is challenging for us", Jones pointed out.
A Facebook spokesperson responded by saying that people smuggling is illegal and that "any ads, posts, pages, or groups that coordinate this activity are not allowed” on the social network. The spokesperson argued that the company closely cooperates with law enforcement agencies across the world, including Europol, "to identify, remove, and report this illegal activity".
Over the past several years, the UK has seen thousands of migrants, mostly from war-stricken countries in Africa and the Middle East, make the perilous journey across the English Channel from France, to arrive on British soil. A source recently told The Sunday Telegraph citing council figures as saying that around one quarter of migrants who have claimed to be children upon arriving in the UK are actually older than 18.
