[MUSIC] Hello, all of you out there and welcome again to People in the Past, a podcast about real people and the ancient world. Every episode we chat with academics and professionals to bring you real stories and cutting-edge research about the everyday folk who lived in antiquity. My name is Chelsea Gardner and I'm Melissa Funke. You are listening to season four, which is slightly different from our previous three seasons because we're shifting our focus for these episodes to the theme of cultural heritage and legacies of colonialism. So listeners, you can expect to hear from world-class scholars about ongoing inequities and issues facing the field of archaeology, museum studies, and Mediterranean history today. Don't forget to head over to our website, PeopleInThePast.com, to find a company material for this and all our episodes, including links, suggestions for further readings, pictures, and a transcript. And if you're on social media, give us a follow. We're @ PeopleInThePast across all socials. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about how social media and online communities fuel the illegal antiquities trade. So, Melissa, who is our guest today? Our guest today is Katie Paul. She is co-director of the antiquities trafficking and heritage anthropology research project, also known as ATAR, and director of the Tech Transparency Project. Her work focuses on the trafficking and destruction of cultural property and its connections to transnational crime and terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly the role of technology and social media in monitoring trafficking and nations in crisis. Previously, Katie served as chief of staff and a research fellow at the antiquities coalition, which is a Washington DC-based nonprofit dedicated to combat and cultural racketeering. And I can recommend that you go and find more about her work and the work of ATAR at ATARproject.org. So welcome, Katie, to PeopleInThePast. How are you today? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, we're really looking forward to learning more about the work of ATAR in monitoring antiquities trafficking. So, could you start by telling us about how organized crime, terrorism, and antiquities are connected? As many people know, there's a vast black market out there for really anything you can imagine from antiquities to drugs, to weapons, to people. And you can factor in different materials in that. Often the networks are the same. So, an antiquity for it to get from someone's backyard or from a war zone to a gallery in some of the wealthiest cities in the world like New York, it's not somebody just shipping it out from the war zone. There's a chain of individuals and organizations that it needs to pass through in order to get there. And often these are controlled by transnational criminal organizations in some countries that's mafia, in some countries those are warlords, in other countries those are cartels. And through there, it makes its way into kind of these laundering points where antiquities then are more easily shifted to the western world. And terrorist groups, most famously in recent years ISIS, have capitalized on this as one of the many ways that they try to finance themselves. In countries like Iraq or Yemen or Syria, antiquities are one of the most valuable things you can mind from the earth, oil in some cases, and there's a black market trade for oil by terrorist groups. But antiquities are another piece. And so when you see terrorist groups using this performative destruction of sites, it's important to keep in mind anything that could be moved and sold already has been. They're getting the most they can financially out of it by taking those propaganda videos and distributing those at the end. It's essentially free media. You know, we know that especially in the west, western media is not going to show propaganda video of a beheading or something graphic, but you will see all across to American media, the performative destruction of these sites. And that's a propaganda message from terrorist groups and war criminals as well. And we see it happening not just in the Middle East, we see it with Russia's deliberate destruction of sites in Ukraine. This is something that happens all around the world. And we still don't factor that in as a financial aspect for these groups, but really it's free media in lieu of having a press team. So one of the things that you do through author is that you have been monitoring some of these trades and some of the publicization, right? As you said, of the destruction of sites using social media. So which platforms have you been looking at? Facebook is largely the main platform. Now Facebook entities like Instagram and WhatsApp, they all are under the meta umbrella now. Those are also pieces in it. We get asked a lot about TikTok. TikTok is growing in a lot of fields. This is not one where it's used as much for that. YouTube is also very popular, but for different reasons. Facebook is really where it is. And one of the best ways to describe its value is when you think of the black market in the early 2000s or the 90s. It's a concept. There's not a place that you go to. There is no black market where you go and you buy guns and things. But there is now. And it's on Facebook. Not just for antiquities, even in some of the antiquities trafficking groups that we see for Afghanistan, for instance, people sell unexploded grenades from American and Chinese troops that left those materials behind. So they really are one-stop shops and they're on Facebook. There's no other platform that has the global reach. I mean, there's a third of the planet is on Facebook. And no other platform that has the functionality in terms of private groups, private messaging, payment. You can do all of that without leaving the app. You know, Facebook, in some of my other work looking at tech, it's important to remember that in the developing world, Facebook is the internet. But that means it's not just that everybody's on Facebook. Of course, in the Middle East, it was very popular after the Arab Spring and the role it played in providing a voice to the voiceless. And as the developing world increasingly got online and Facebook was really maxing out its penetration in the West, it needed to find ways to get more data points, to be able to push ads to more people. And how do you do that? You have to get the developing world that don't have access to internet or finances to access internet. You have to get them online. As mobile phones were becoming more valuable, computers are expensive. They're expensive in the West. They're very expensive overseas. But mobile phones are more accessible, especially Android-type phones. Most people in most places in the world can access a smartphone now. And what Facebook did was actually create these partnerships with mobile providers all over the world in developing countries. They did this in Latin America. They did it in the Middle East. They've done it in Africa. These would provide zero rated data. Because while the smartphones can be cheap, the data is what's expensive. Even now, you go overseas, and you're like, "Oh, I've got to make sure I turn off all of my roaming." And it's because the data is expensive no matter what country you're from. Facebook created this thing called internet.org. It later rebranded it several times as free basics. And now I think it's Facebook Discover, where they would partner with mobile providers, so for instance in Iraq in 2015, as ISIS was really becoming popular for its massive social media network. Corek Iraq, which is a mobile provider, partnered with Facebook, where you could access Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and maybe like two or three other apps, like a weather app or something else. For zero rated data, it'd be totally free. And doing that, Facebook, in some countries, was deemed to violate that neutrality because they were the internet. You couldn't go to Google to find something, if something was true, to confirm. And when it comes to black markets, that made it super easy for this platform to be utilized for black market purposes in a lot of different areas. In my day job for the Tech Transparency Project, we talked about how this has been used to really amplify human smuggling and migrant trafficking in Latin America because Facebook is the internet. Almost every Latin American country had zero rated data for Facebook. And now Facebook got a big chunk of the world on the internet. In many cases, economies are dependent on the access to that platform because in lieu of paying for a domain, people just create a Facebook page for their company, for their business. And you can't cut off access without collapsing an economy that has not only had its positive effects in terms of helping the economy, but when you're dealing with the multi-billion dollar corporation that makes zero effort to enforce law, to enforce its own policies, especially in foreign languages, you have this burgeoning black market for quite literally anything. With antiquities in particular, we see a lot of developing countries or the source countries for antiquities. On Facebook, you can connect with a trafficker in seconds. You don't have to know a guy who knows a guy. You just get on a group called Pharonic Antiquities for Sale, post a picture of what you have, and you've just solicited hundreds of potential buyers. The largest Facebook group we are monitoring, and we're monitoring 550 some now, but the largest one is 950,000 members. I wish our listeners could see our faces. Chelsea and I, like our jaws are literally dropped listening to all of this information. We're so indicative of, again, we're confronted with our privilege all the time, and thinking about this experience, this reality.
Facebook is the internet for this large swath of the world. And I would imagine that most folks who run an hour circles aren't aware of that either. I had no idea. I mean, I'm sure that information is available, but we don't think about this. And whether it's promoting something like Wikipedia, the free and psychopedia, anybody can access it. But you're right. Not if you don't have the internet, not if you don't have data, not if you can only access Facebook. It's shocking and very sad. Like it's very depressing. Yeah. Part of what this series is on is about colonialism, right? And this is a really good example of digital colonialism. Absolutely. Yes. It is a multi-billion dollar American company making absurd amounts of money off of the data of these people. In many cases, in places like Myanmar and India, what Facebook did with the data on these previously unmapped or unrequarded communities, is it then sold that data back as data points for targeted advertising to politicians? So in Modi's India, we see lots of examples. I'm sure you've seen the media about lynchings that have been driven by misinformation on Facebook specifically. In Myanmar, which has been facing a genocide of the Rohingya population, this is probably the most stark example of this. At the time, it had zero Burmese speakers for content moderation. And the UN found Facebook partially responsible for inciting the genocide because of the vast array of misinformation that was completely unchecked on the platform. And then in 2016, after the UN had made that announcement, Facebook quietly ended the Internet.org program. And just for reference, the dot org is a misnomer. It was not a nonprofit. It was a profit driver. And that's also part of the catch, right? Like they push it as a philanthropic effort, but they're making billions. And this is part of the privilege of, you know, this is an American company making money off of these communities, off of digital illiteracy. And there are real world consequences. And those are the most extreme versions, right? We see those. I mean, we've seen the consequences here in the United States, misinformation driving, you know, the near overtake of Congress on January 6. Facebook was a huge part of that. That was a big piece of research that I did for several years. But this is happening all over the world. And so a black market for a trade like Antiquities just explodes because you don't have the real world effect in the same way as a person is not directly dying as a result of a post. If you can't even hold Facebook accountable for real people dying because of their actions, what chance do antiquities have, right? Like when faced with that decision, like, and they're not being held accountable for blood on their hands, quite literally, how do you even begin to hold them accountable for something that does not even come close to human lives? I'm hoping we can maybe break this down because I think there's something, and you make a very strong case for this in your work, that Facebook has all these specific unique tools that can be used by traffickers. So what are the specific aspects of Facebook that are allowing traffickers to use it with such ease and without monitoring and sort of slipping past authorities? So Facebook's tools that are the most valuable for traffickers are certainly Facebook groups because those can provide a sense of being in a private community, especially if the group is private and you have to answer questions to get in. But they can be huge communities and everybody that's in them is therefore the purpose of the group, which is either to learn how to loot or to traffic antiquities. And so when Facebook says, you know, well, we have these tools and you can report this. If you're joining a group to traffic antiquities, you're not going to report somebody for trafficking antiquities. I was going to say, unless you're you, presumably joining groups to report people trafficking antiquities, but I imagine you're in the minority there. And you know, I have done that and the mechanism doesn't work. The after they created their policy, they deemed the report's not violating standards. I've done this. I've also reported drug posts, same thing. So it's not worth the mental labor to train their moderation, you know, machine learning when it's not doing anything anyway. But the other things that within those groups, there is the option to not you don't just have to say, I have this item for sale. What you can actually do is post a photo or video or in some cases, even live stream within the group, a video of yourself actively looting while getting tips on what to do to dig. And you know, this is all increased over time as, you know, the technology itself has become better and more accessible and more widely accessible. But now one of the other features that is offered in Facebook groups is you can post anonymously. So you don't even have to link to a profile. You don't even have to bother creating a fake profile, which just happens often. But you can just post anonymously. And so if you're worried about in a country like Egypt, for instance, that actually does arrest people for trafficking antiquities on Facebook, if you're worried about getting caught, you just post anonymously, no one's going to find you. That's also a way people, if they find a site that they are excavating or that they are preparing to steal stuff from and they're in a fairly populated area, they can post anonymously without giving away where their location is. So nobody comes and takes that site or like takes the stuff that they're going for. So there are a lot of ways that that serves to protect users from both other users and from the authorities. And that's just the cool within the groups. Right. So let's go back to something that we like, you touched on, but I need to know so much more about this. If you're, you know, you're said you're reporting things and it's not being, nothing is being done about this. I'm going to phrase this in a way that I'm, it's going to come back to bite me, but like, surely it's not allowed to traffic antiquities on Facebook, no? Well, it used to be. Actually, when we started this research, you know, when I first started looking at social media and tech, I was finishing up grad school. I had every intention of going to do a PhD in archaeology and going to dig. My last semester of grad school was the Arab Spring. And obviously the world technology was significant. And there was also a lot of looting of museums and sites. And it really became a period where I thought to myself, going to dig does not do anything to contribute when there is this huge other issue going on. And it's not just that we're talking about people in crisis or, you know, these are, there's obviously a lot of subsistence looting that occurs, and especially in conflict zones, but it occurs because there is a massive demand and Western market for that. Black market oil from ISIS is not making its way to Fifth Avenue in New York, but antiquities are. Initially, I was doing this research, you know, starting in 2011, focusing on following Egyptian archaeologists and members of civil society who were like live posting on Facebook, I just went to a site in Daeshur and the site is being looted right now. And I was systematically tracking all those posts to try to keep track of what was happening at sites. And so I was doing it to follow these, you know, what I considered archaeoactivists, these researchers and activists who were trying to get a handle on what was happening. So searching in Arabic, you know, to find more groups related to that or, you know, related to antiquities, I totally stumbled upon a group that was actually trafficking antiquities. And I was like, oh my God. And as I started to dig a little bit more, I found more and more of these groups. They really started to take off, I'd say, around 2015, 2016. Part of that is just the state of crisis, many countries in the region we're in at the time. Part of it is access to mobile phones, mobile technology, mobile technology becoming cheaper and more accessible. There are a lot of factors that feed into that. And you also have the platform, Facebook that is just exploding in popularity and it is not scaling any of its moderation to match that. And what was really shocking was that some of the material, particularly from Syria, it's important to remember that the plunder and trafficking of antiquities in a conflict zone is a war crime. This is one war crime that is actually being facilitated by Facebook. It's not just a matter of somebody commits a war crime and posts a video of it. The war crime is happening on the platform. I can't think of any other maybe human trafficking, which also occurs on the platform. Any other instance where that's the case. The industrial scale of the trafficking that is possible by Facebook is something that is really unmatched. We're not talking about somebody's been able to traffic items that they found in their yard because their cousin's brother knows somebody who can get it to a network. You don't have to take those steps, Newark. It's too clicks and you're connected to a network. You're connected to potential extremists. You're connected to a global network of people. And we've seen people from who will offer the ship to any kind of
people who will offer to, you know, in the region go across borders to other countries to, for very specific material they're searching. These are connections that would not be possible in the real world without an extended amount of time and effort. We see it happening in real time on the platform. That is something that was by Facebook's policies allowed. As working with my colleague Amar Al-Azam, who's a Syrian archaeologist and has done a lot on the traffic and the antiquities since 2012 in Syria particularly, you know, as the war started, we thought, "Oh my God, how is this possible?" And looking through their policies, there was nothing about artifacts. There was something about illegal sales. And so we put a report out through the Ather Project in 2019 that got a lot of attention on this issue. And important to remember, we have day jobs. And just with expertise and some time investment, this is something we were able to uncover. So imagine if Facebook actually invested in experts and research to address these problems, not just antiquities, but any illicit trade. There is a total ability to address these trades even without the technology. It's a choice to not do so and not make that investment. And about six months after the report really got a lot of attention and obviously reporters were reaching out to you meta for comments on this issue, we got contacted by Facebook who said that they were looking into creating a policy on this. This is great. This company, you know, they're breaking a policy on this. Let's see where it goes. We, through Alliance to Countercrime Online, had worked with a lot of people who deal with wildlife trafficking on Facebook that have run this race a few times with Facebook. And so we kind of knew how the game worked. We've seen how the platforms will quote unquote partner with organizations, but it's really just using those organizations as a shield from their own responsibility to higher experts, you know, capitalizing on nonprofits who care, saying they're partnering with them and then just being like, OK, you know, that's something that we see with lots of issues with these platforms. And so we were kind of on guard about that, but hopeful, you know, the people that reached out, they had backgrounds in human rights research and work crime stuff and one of them worked on Syria. So we were really hopeful. These are people that understand that this is a problem in care. Many people that go to work for this company, not the executives, but people that do this kind of work, they do care. They go thinking, I have the right background. I can make a difference here. And they did invest in creating a policy and the policy was created. It was announced in 2020, about almost exactly a year after our report was released. They decided the policy that they created specifically, they called it the band, the trade of what they called historical artifacts. That was kind of, I think, their way of covering the whole range of things because they realized it was impossible to confirm in items provenance, the case of much of the research we do, items are offered while they're still in C2 and in the ground. So it's very clear that they're leaving. This was hopeful and they let us know they were creating the policy and asked us if we would be willing to help train their machine learning by continuing to report these, which this is a billion dollar company. They also have higher experts to do this. We do this research and made very clear that we do this research to preserve a record of these issues, understand these networks. We don't do it to help a corporation. We do it for the preservation of heritage and that is our priority. We gave it a few months after the policy was announced and decided to test and see, all right, they have the policy. We also have reports of stuff. We worked with Jane Arif from MPR who was addressing this. We also shared reports, items with her that she reported. None of it was deemed to violate community standards, despite they had just created a community standard for this. Some of the items were actually artifacts made out of human skulls. They were they were Tibetan artifacts and human remains separately, also not allowed on the platform. The multiple policy violations, still not deeming to violate community standards. So that is just I think really the perfect example of how these policies and I think especially for me and the research I continue to do on other issues on tech moving forward, that these policies are really just window dressing for PR. They exist on paper so the companies, spokespeople, whether you see, you know, antiquities in a war zone or drugs being trafficked to kids, the spokespeople can say those are not allowed on our platform. We take steps to remove content when we are made aware of it. We did make them aware of it and that content was not removed. I've been commenting throughout this season that that capitalism is like the thread that connects all of these and of course capitalism and colonialism are bedfellows. But this is just the most barefaced example of it where capitalism must be served above all and as you're pointing out really horrible things that violate I would like to say our global community standards. And yet there's no real meaningful will on the part of the platform to do anything. It's really shocking but looking at this it's very clear that there's really no will on the part of the platform to invest quite the contrary they've actually in the past year all of the big tech companies have laid off thousands of people in their trust in safety teams in their moderation teams that are actually supposed to combat this and they're putting that money toward AI. So again this is just gets back to how how did I get to what I'm doing now from wanting to be an archaeologist and go do a day. And so now when you compare that long standing market that you know it's a colonial situation it's western high end entities making money off of the financial desperation or the financial drive of either you know vulnerable populations or criminal organizations and it's the exact same model we're seeing with regard to what the tech companies are doing. So you combine those two things and the lack of will in both entities to address the issue that's how we have this perfect storm of what we're looking at now and we really believe that Facebook is the largest digital black market for antiquities there's nothing at that scale people have been researching eBay for a long time and it's true there's a lot of good stuff on eBay but eBay's global user base is like 138 million. Facebook's global user base is 3 billion are there any movements like in either in any of these countries or in North America either through organizations or through post secondary institutions or whatever where they have where they were recruiting volunteers to help with these efforts like are there any like grass roots initiatives to help you and what you're doing. So that at the moment we are working to build out a broader research organization where we can hopefully get some funding to get researchers because as somebody who did a lot of work in academia and I'm very very much not a fan of taking financial advantage of good good meaning people who want the experience. If it's just an intern I want to be able to pay them something and I can't do that out of pocket at the moment we want to be able to get research to or funding to do that and we're working toward that the platforms have created a way where they make it impossible for developing countries to have any leverage and just to like give an example how bad some of this is one of the issues that Thailand which is a huge market for Facebook had faced several years ago is that people were selling babies on Facebook. And the Thai government had made some threats like we will like cut off your access if you don't deal with this and so like in Thai Facebook dealt with that but you can there's still happens in a lot of other countries but that's just like that's how bad the situation is and it's something that when when companies say oh we're helping authorities or we're working with them. That's that's not good enough because these authorities are already resource strapped and they shouldn't have to be doing the cleanup job of a corporation that is profiting from these harms. It is devastating. Right and I know that you know we've lost some of the antiquities bit in some of this but it understanding this problem and the scale of it and in the years that I've been working on this understanding the other issues tied in are so critical to seeing that this is a big deal. It's a big deal to see that this is a much bigger ecosystem and you know actually our work with the Alliance to counter crime online. Part of that was born out of just myself and armor and you know meeting with other researchers who were working on drug trafficking ones that were working on wildlife trafficking and we realized the mechanisms are identical. The tactics of the traffickers are identical. You're just switching out the illicit trade. This is devastating stuff. I am grateful, profoundly grateful to you and to other people like you who are doing this work regardless of what that what the illicit thing is that's being traded in traffic on these sites but I'm equally filled with like rage that anybody has to do any of this.
because it should, like your, you should be out of a job. You should not have this job. The corporation should take care of it, right? - And I will say, just reflecting on that, your work is really powerful, right? And yeah, and it involves stepping into spaces that might be uncomfortable in some ways, but it's very powerful that you are taking this on, this really challenging space. - Katie, thank you so much. This was, I'm not gonna say like uplifting or enjoyable, but talking to you was wonderful and we appreciate everything that you're doing, everything that you have done, and taking the time today. - Thanks for having me and thanks for listening. You know, it's kind of a wonky topic, but it's so ingrained in things that we all deal with every day in our lives now. These technology platforms, and I think, you know, shining light on that, on any information about them is the best disinfectant for, you know, what we're dealing with now in terms of harms from them and what's to come. - Totally. We do have one more question for you, and I'm very curious to know where this is gonna go, but what do you, Katie, Paul, identify with from the ancient world? - You know, I think I would have to say, I identify with Hatshepsut because gone, you know, a man's title and a man's role, and a lot of the work I do, not just, you know, antiquities and cultural heritage, but also of research on extremism and militia. For a long time, these were men's roles and men, you know, areas that were dominated by men. And so I kind of relate in that she just took it on, and was later, you know, kind of dealt with issues for it. Her name was wiped in many cases from the history books, quite literally, by men that came after her, but I'd say, you know, that kind of like strong woman and she didn't call herself a queen, she was a king, and I really dig that, and I think I can relate to that. - And that is our show. Thank you again for listening, and a reminder that you can find all the episodes of our podcast, including the first three seasons on your preferred podcast platform, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Give us a rating and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. We're also on social media at People In The Past, and you can listen to our podcast and find other great content like videos and blogs on our website, peopleinthepass.com. If you like what we do, please tell your friends, family, and colleagues. Share and tag us on social media with the hashtag #PeopleInPodcast and feel free to reach out any time via direct message or email
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