Apple threatens Facebook to ban its app

Apple threatened Facebook to remove its application from the App Store after a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC revealed that human traffickers use the famous social networking site to arrange human trafficking. The Wall Street Journal reported that human traffickers from the Middle East were using Facebook to post recruitment ads that are in fact a front for human trafficking. The newspaper said that after the publication of the BBC investigation, Apple threatened to remove the Facebook application from its own store.

The newspaper added that Facebook was aware of the problem even before the BBC investigation. And internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal showed that Facebook employees sounded the alarm about the wrong uses of the platform in developing countries, but the company's response was insufficient and sometimes did not occur at all.

According to the documents, employees discovered that human traffickers in the Middle East used the site to lure women to work in abusive working conditions, where they were treated like slaves or forced to have sex.

Facebook had announced a plan of reforms during previous years aimed at ensuring that the platform was a better healthy place, encouraging discussions and exchanging ideas on many political, social, and economic issues, but the algorithms that were adopted led to counterproductive results, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And Facebook discovered a prostitution ring that used the site to recruit women from Thailand and other countries. According to an internal investigation report, the gang detained the women, deprived them of food, and forced them to perform sexual acts in massage parlors in Dubai.

In another incident, a Kenyan teacher from Nairobi, Patricia Wanga Kimani, read a recruitment ad on Facebook promising free travel tickets and visas, even though the company had banned recruitment ads promoting free travel and visa fees.

Kimani explained that most of the publications were referring to the need for cleaners in Saudi Arabia, and explained that she was promised $300 per month to work in cleaning services in Riyadh, but she did not receive that agreed wage.