[audiothrowaway]

From the article, describing evidence of continued trade in persons on FB's platforms:

The problem, however, continues today across both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook appears to acknowledge that in more recent documents seen by the AP. It described engineers accessing problematic messages in maid-recruiting agencies’ inboxes, including one in which a Filipina specifically is mentioned as being “sold” by her Kuwaiti employers.

“Sometimes my head and ears hurt from being hit,” another batch of messages from a Filipina in Kuwait read. “When I escape from here, how will I get my passport? And how can we get out of here? The door is always locked.”

Another Filipina housemaid in Kuwait, who described being “sold” to another family through an Instagram post in December 2012, told the AP that she knew of other cases of Filipinas being “traded online like merchandise.”

“I was like an animal that was being traded by one owner to another,” said the woman, who spoke from Kuwait on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. “If Facebook and Instagram won’t take stronger steps against this anomaly, there will be more victims like me. I was lucky because I did not end up dead or a sexual slave.”