Key Sentence:
- Facebook announced it would limit the illegal sale of Amazon rainforest reserves on its website.
The new measures only apply to nature reserves, not to public forests. Also the move will be limited to the Amazon, not the rainforests and other wildlife habitats around the world.
According to a recent study by the Spam think tank (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia). A third of all deforestation occurs in public forests in the Amazon. Facebook said it would not disclose how it plans to detect illegal ads but would seek to “identify and block” new ads in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest.
In February, the documentary Our World’s Sale of Amazon revealed that tropical forest properties with up to 1,000 football fields were added to Facebook’s advertising service.
Most of the land is in protected areas, including national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples.
The arranged a meeting between four vendors and an agent posing as a lawyer claiming to represent wealthy investors to prove the ad was actual. A land robber, Alvim Souza Alves, attempted to sell the property on the local Uru Eu Wau Wau reservation for around £16,400 in local currency. In response to a investigation, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into Amazon’s sale of asylum on Facebook.
The company now says it is consulting with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). And other agencies to take “first steps” to address the issue. “We will now compare listings from Facebook Marketplace with leading databases for protected areas from international organizations to identify listings. That could violate this new policy,” the Californian technology company said.
The announcement comes when the social media giant is under increasing pressure from US lawmakers. After a series of bombings by whistleblower and former Facebook team member Francis Haugen.
Will this work?
To catch criminal sellers, Facebook uses a database maintained by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Center. But Brazilian lawyer and researcher Brenda Brito questioned the effectiveness of Facebook’s proposal, saying. If sellers are not required to provide the location of sales territories, any attempt to block them is wrong. The found that some advertisements contained satellite imagery and GPS coordinates but did not contain all of this information during its investigation.