Facebook used as a platform to promote dog fighting: report

Dog fighting content is found in abundance on Facebook due to the company’s failure to enforce policies against it

Facebook has come under fire for taking insufficient steps to prevent the internationally prevalent practice of dog fighting.

According to a report published by animal rights organisation Lady Freethinker, dog fighting content is found in abundance on Facebook due to the company’s failure to enforce its own policies against it.

The organisation was able to locate 2000 posts encouraging dog fighting or trafficking animals to fight competitively, over 150 pages, groups and profiles participating in the practice and 160,563 collective members of the top five pages and groups alone over the span of five months (Oct 2018 to Feb 2019).



While the organisations’ investigator reported 26 posts to Facebook that violated community guidelines, only an underwhelming six were actually removed by Facebook. The rest were left up despite using common keywords associated with dog fighting, some of which are coded.

"Facebook has become ground zero for discussing the merits of particular dogs and breeders, often on closed forums. Many of the pages and groups use coded terminology the average reader might not understand," the report states. "A dog could be described as a 'grand champion' with five wins (Gr Ch) or a 'champion' with three wins (Ch), or a promoter may reference the box the dogs fight in (4x4)."

Lady Freethinker founder Nina Jackel said, in a statement to The Guardian, “The level of violence and exploitation of dogs is appalling. Facebook is often used as a platform for advocacy to effect positive change, but as our report shows, it is failing to protect innocent animals from abuse and possible death. By not enforcing its own policies against animal cruelty, Facebook is complicit in perpetuating criminal acts against dogs," she told the newspaper.



It was recapitulated by a Facebook spokesperson that promoting or depicting staged animal fighting is a violation of Facebook user guidelines and not allowed on the platform. "We’re grateful to Lady Freethinker for bringing these posts to our attention and we have contacted them so we can get the information we need to investigate this content," the spokesperson said. "If people see something on Facebook they think breaks our Community Standards, we encourage them to report it using the tools on our platform so our teams can investigate and take action."

This article originally appeared on Mashable.