Facebook, the
social media giant in the news over the last week for all the wrong reasons, has
decided it will clampdown on illegal sale of protected areas of the Amazon
rainforest on its website. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has said that it
will not reveal how it plans to find illegal advertisements but will seek to
identify and block new listings for sale of protected areas of the rainforest.

Selling the
Amazon

Earlier this year,
a British media network revealed that huge plots of the Amazon rainforest were
being sold through classified ads on Facebook. Many of the plots were located
inside protected areas and land reserved for indigenous peoples, the BBC
documentary claimed.

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After the report
came out, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ordered an inquiry into the sale of
protected areas of the Amazon on Facebook.

Signs of
resistance

After the
court-ordered inquiry, leaders of indigenous groups called upon Facebook to
take action against advertisements to sell parts of the Amazon. At the time,
Facebook said that while it was ready to work with local authorities, it would
not take independent action to halt the trade.

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Change of
heart

For quite some
time, Facebook maintained its position of non-intervention on the plot-by-plot
sale of the world’s biggest biodiversity reservoir. However recently, the
company says that it consulted with the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) and other organisations and has decided to take steps to tackle the
issue.

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“We will now
review listings on Facebook Marketplace against an international organisation’s
authoritative database of protected areas to identify listings that may violate
this new policy,” the company announced.

Will it work

Facebook has
decided to use the database managed by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring
Centre to crackdown on ads selling the Amazon. According to UNEP, the database
is the most “comprehensive” of its kind and is updated every month from a range
of government and other institutions.

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However, not
everyone believes this to be the anathema to the problem of sale of protected
Amazon land. Lawyers and activists engaged in various processes to protect the
Amazon say that even if the best database is used, it won’t help unless there
is some geo-location reference.

Rough week
for Facebook

Facebook’s decision
to take corrective action and ensure steps to stop the sale of Amazon comes in
a week that the social media giant has taken a significant beating in the
public eye. First, with whistleblower Frances Haugen making sensational claims
about what Facebook could have done but did not to counter hate speech on its
platform. Then, Facebook and its subsidiary social media networks including
WhatsApp and Instagram faced a global outage affecting millions of users.