Denver Gazette recently issued the following announcement.
Here’s one of the hardest parts about fighting fentanyl: Our kids don’t have to go to some seedy neighborhood or sketchy park to find drugs anymore.
Now there’s a drug dealer squatting in your house, lurking in the palm of every kid’s hand.
The Drug Enforcement Administration recently issued its first public safety alert since 2015 to warn about internet pushers selling counterfeit pills laced with the deadly opioid fentanyl. “The drug dealer isn’t just standing on a street corner anymore,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. “It’s sitting in a pocket on your phone.”
Unfortunately, we have our very own Exhibit A of this heinous trend in Colorado.
Alexis Nicole Wilkins, 26, was recently arrested in Colorado Springs on suspicion of selling fentanyl to teenage girls, one of whom died after taking a pill at school. The court documents show that a teacher at Mitchell High School called for help toward the end of class after seeing the student "foaming at the mouth." The girl was taken to a local hospital, where she died from "fentanyl intoxication," the documents say.
The police affidavit in the case said Wilkins was part of Facebook groups centered on dealing drugs. She interacted with other users about buying or selling drugs as her Facebook page had hundreds of pictures and posts of what she was selling, the affidavit says.
“Facebook data shows Wilkins has been engaged in the distribution of fentanyl for many months," the affidavit states.
Facebook pages, Instagram accounts and YouTube videos are promoting drug sales to thousands of followers or viewers, according to a new report by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a consumer watchdog group, and the Coalition for a Safer Web. Teens are buying what they think are OxyContin, Percocet or Xanax pills via social media, but drug dealers are selling counterfeit pills with the more addictive and deadly synthetic drug fentanyl. So teens don't know what they are getting, and fentanyl is so strong — 50 times more powerful than morphine — one pill can kill.
I reached out to Meta, the new parent company of Facebook, to ask them what they are doing about dealing via its site, especially to kids.
To Facebook’s credit, Jeanne Moran, policy communications manager at Meta, responded to my queries and provided me ample information on how Meta handles restricted goods on its platforms.
Since 2016, Facebook has used a strategy called "remove, reduce, inform" to manage content.
“This means we remove harmful content that goes against our policies, reduce the distribution of problematic content that doesn’t violate our policies, and inform people with additional context so they can decide what to click, read or share,” according to a page in the Transparency Center.
Meta policy documents say that “We do not allow the sale of illicit drugs on our platform. It's against our Community Standards to buy, sell or trade non-medical or pharmaceutical drugs. We're working hard to keep this content off Facebook and Instagram while surfacing communities of support that help those struggling with addiction.”
Meta has hired more moderators, developed artificial-intelligence algorithms, limited searches for keywords related to drugs, and leaned on reports from their community and reviews by their teams to enforce these policies. They regularly remove content that violates their policies and ban search terms that might allow people to search for drugs.
In addition, Meta routinely responds to law enforcement requests for information, including those related to activity like illegal drug sales. Police in Colorado Springs said they did reach out to Facebook for help with the case.
Meta also has initiated partnerships with federal, state and local authorities, as well as nonprofits, on ways they can use social media as a tool to raise awareness. For example, they support Song For Charlie in its efforts to raise awareness of fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills, and the risks they pose to young people.
Despite all these efforts, however, people like Wilkins are still finding a way around the safeguards.
A recent Facebook Transparency Report said that AI flagged 94% of illegal drug sales posts before anyone reported them. That still means 354,000 confirmed illegal drug sales were reported by users after they slipped through the AI system, according to published reports. For the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook reported that “out of every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, we estimate no more than 5 of those views contained content that violated the policy” concerning regulated goods like drugs. Alas, with 2.9 billion monthly users — the most of any social media site in the world — that means 1,450,000 people are still seeing content that violates its "restricted goods" policies every month.
Just how good are social media sites at cracking down?
The Organization for Social Media Safety recently reported that its researchers connected with drug dealers on multiple social media sites in under three minutes.
A report released by tech advocacy group the Tech Transparency Project said that accounts advertising the sale of Xanax, ecstasy, opioids and other drugs are still widespread and easy to find on Instagram, which is owned by Meta.
Of course, politicians could do something about this right now.
Facebook and other internet platforms are shielded from any potential liability in deaths like the one in Colorado Springs by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which treats internet companies like Facebook as platforms rather than publishers. (For example, if The Gazette ran ads for drugs, we could be sued blind, whereas Facebook is considered more like the utility pipe that brings water to your home — its not responsible for the water itself. ) But just as Congress made an exception to Section 230 in order to ban sites that allow solicitation for prostitution, there’s no reason they can’t make another exception for the illegal sale of fentanyl and other drugs.
Colorado politicians could carve out an exception in the rule for Colorado any time if they had guts to take on Big Tech.
You want to see drug dealing stop instantly on social media? Each time a little girl dies because of a Facebook dealer, make Facebook pay $20 million. I’m guessing they would get extremely good at this in no time.
Original source can be found here.
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