Why Drugs Are Still for Sale on Instagram

of fentanyl patches. In the photo caption or at the top of the profile page would be all the information to buy the drugs and have them shipped to your house. An activists named Eileen Carey had sent me these files. I'm constantly hearing about people's problems with Facebook and Instagram, and I think it's because I've been writing for so long about how bad they are with policing content. They hire thousands of people to review what we post online,

but sometimes there are big, terrifying gaps an enforcement. Eileen had spotted a big one. Aileen doesn't work for the police or the government or anything. She came across the issue through her work in cybersecurity and crisis management, because, in addition to the vacation picks and brand campaigns and celebrity posts, Instagram is also a place where illegal drugs and counterfeit prescription medicines are sold, and it's all out

in the open. To find the stuff, you just need to search for the right hashtag HASHTAGSANX hashtag, thirty milligrams hash hag zan x bars, hashtag asticons and hashtag pain killers, hashtag codein, hashtag hydrocodon hashtag. This is the first episode in our new season of Decrypted, dedicated to exploring how the tech industry is pushing the limits of the world around us. Today, we'll tell you about Aileen's fight to get Instagram and Facebook to take down posts showcasing drugs

for sale. Despite the explosion of this type of content, Facebook and Instagram have been slow to react, choosing to push the limits of what its uses and lawmakers would tolerate before taking action. I'm Pia Gatkari and I'm Sarah Fryar, and you're listening to Decrypted. One day, Eileen reached out to me on Twitter and I agreed to meet her. It was a rainy day in December and we talked for two hours straight on a couch at her coworking space. I grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, that same

small three mile town as Mark Zuckerberg. We're the same age. Aileen had worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Then she moved to Silicon Valley. So I moved out here, thinking I was going to work at Facebook or Google or you know one of those companies. She ended up working for an anti counterfeiting company. Basically, it used technology to search the web for fake versions of its clients products. It was Eileen's job to make sure the public had

no idea just how many fakes were out there. This problem of online counterfeits was somewhat new. It was and the amount of stuff people were buying online was exploding, and along with that, the volume of fake goods being sold on the internet was exploding to Eileen's biggest client was the pharmaceutical company Perdue Pharma. The company makes oxycontent, a narcotic pain killer, which we now know is incredibly addictive.

Eileen already knew about all the drugs being sold online because was the year when the FBI shut down the notorious website called Silk Road, alleging that it should become a massive online marketplace for buying and selling drugs and guns. But Eileen discovered that there was another way for thousands of online sales to take place. It turns out that it wasn't just counterfeit prescription drugs like OxyContin and percocet, but all sorts of illegal street drugs that were being

sold on Instagram. It is misinformation that drug sales happen entirely on the dark web. Sure, maybe wholesale right, like huge, huge shipments of of drugs, but direct to consumer purchases of M D M A of cocaine, of xan x that occurs on Instagram, on Facebook, this problem is well known by experts in the space. To put it bluntly, it's a colossal issue. That's Daniel Bennett, the CEO of Yellow Brand Protection. He works with some of the biggest brands in the world to help them keep fake products

off the Internet. Daniel explained that it's easier to block counterfeit goods when they're for sale on an e commerce website because you have to set up an account before you can sell anything. With social networks, It's different with Instagram. In particular. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to use your personal identity to make an account. All you need is an email address or a phone number. Social networks, of course, are are generally more complex than say, for instance, online marketplaces.

Just pure just purely down to the fact that obviously, if you go to an online marketplace, you know that there's commercial activity, you know there's something to sale immediately, whereas searching on social media, um, you know you're you're gonna be finding a lot of sentiments, a lot of discussion about different products. We're often following links through to online pharmacies or online marketplaces where the actual sale would

take place. Sales of drugs seemed to be proliferating on all the popular new tech platforms, not just Facebook and Instagram. You could find them on Craigslist, Google, Ali Baba, and others. Part of Alien's job was to work with the tech companies to see if they would introduce policies to block the sale of drugs on their platforms. Ali Baba and Chinese e commerce companies they were right there, they were right there for enforcing. They were great partners. They were

working with the pharmacutal companies to remove the counterfeits. Eileen discovered that e commerce platforms were pretty open to fighting counterfeits. Craigslist was one of the early platforms to block listings about prescription drugs. Amazon and Ali Baba have created brand registries, which is a way for brands to fast track their reports about fake items and get them taken down faster, and Google has strict guidelines about what kinds of pharmaceuticals

can be advertised on its platform. The social networks were less willing, so Eileen turned to people she knew to try to understand why Facebook wasn't taking action. You actually knew Facebook employees at this time, and you were having those conversations with them directly. Yeah, and what was that like? Frustrating? They you know at the time, it was the I mean, it's the same kind of book that we hear today of that. You know, there's there's so much on the platform.

We're really focused on terrorism, we're doing a you know, that's that's what the big problem is, that it's free speech. That if we start policing one thing, you know, we're going to have to police all these things. Aileen became convinced that Facebook and Instagram were reluctant to act because they weren't legally required to do so. What I know is their legal team was very clear on their policy when we were working with them that no, they were

not going to proactively enforce against counterfeit pharmaceuticals oxy cotton. Facebook, for its part, said it has long standing policies against attempts at buying, selling, or trading non medical drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, or marijuana on Facebook and Instagram, and today it says it's trying to make this tie of content how to to find But one of the common arguments I've heard is that at the time, the company wanted to make sure it wasn't setting a precedent that could be damaging

to its business. If it took down counterfeit drugs, for example, it might also have to police counterfeit handbags, t shirts, jewelry, and more. And it took the same approach to illegal drugs. They don't want to be held liable for anything. So it's very similar to the arguments you see about free speech and about how they are gonna, you know, police free speech. They're not going to take down, you know,

hate speech. Legally, Facebook was in the clear that's because of a law from ninete called the Communications Decency Acts Section two thirty. Essentially, it says that the tech platforms don't need to be held responsible for the content that users post on their sites. There was also a lawsuit from two thousand and eight that sets an important precedent

for the tech industry. Tiffany's the Jewelry and had sued eBay, arguing that the marketplace needed to be proactively taking down counterfeits on its platform, but the courts ruled in favor of eBay. I think the term is generalized knowledge. eBay needs more than simply generalized knowledge that its platform was being used uh to sell counterfeit products. They had to know or had to have a reason to know that there was a specific list in that was counterfeit. That's

Peter Kolosi. He's a partner at the San Francisco law firm Sidmon and Bancroft, and he specializes in anti counterfeiting. So when you talk about the Amazon's or Facebook or Instagram, you know they're all subject to this Tiffany v. eBay um liability requirement that as long as they have a process in place to deal with it, then they're not going to be found to contribute to any trademark infringement or counterfeiting claim. At the end of Aileen left her

job at the anti counterfeiting company. She decided to start a company of her own called glass Breakers, which makes software to empower women in technology. But she was haunted by the things she had learned while tracking counterfeits for Purdue Farmer, and the opioid crisis seemed to be getting worse with every passing month, not just with counterfeits, but first a drug crisis in America today is killing more people each year than aid, gun deaths or car crashes

did at their peak. We wanted to understand how the availability of drugs on major tech platforms was affecting communities hit hardest by the opioid crisis, so we talked to Jessica Hale. She's an addiction counselor at Awakenings Counseling Center in Merylville, Indiana, and she said that she's seeing social networks and multiplayer video games taking over as the simplest ways for her clients to buy drugs. She also had

some unrelated developments in the medical community. We're causing even more people to turn to social media when they were looking for drugs, you know, norcos and vanax. They they're easily found that way. Actually, I think it's probably easier to find them that way because, um, there's so many people that are getting cut off from their doctors that it's not as easy to get anymore. And to find somebody in freet it's a lot harder. I think that social media just makes it a lot easier for them

to find it. If they they really want to, they can find it. Has this changed at all the relationship people have with a regular street dealer? Oh yes, yeah, it's it's pretty remarkable. Um, you know, thirty and forty years ago, it wasn't anything. You know, people would find their their drugs by one uh person that was their dealer and and but now it's it's just like an advertisement.

All of these social sites makes it really easy. You could literally spend twenty minutes on the computer if you're seriously trying to find some drugs and you could get them. You just have to just keep going through the different sites. It's just out there. It was sobering to hear from Jessica. Technology and the internet was making it easier than ever

for people to buy and sell drugs. Jessica told us that people she was counseling could now just get drugs sent to them in the mail, and disappearing messages like the sort of Snapchat is famous for allowed people to advertise when they have drugs for sale. The message only stays up for twenty four hours, so it's pretty hard to get caught. That's what I'm finding is that that snampchat thing is is time h so it doesn't stay

up there long enough to draw of our attention. It's reaching the people that it needs to, but devading some of the other people so well. It might be more more easy to track even on on Instagram or Facebook. It's harder to track on these new platforms like snap and um and the video games Fortnite right oh yeah, UM.

I don't know a lot about Fortnite. I do know that it's an online gaming system and my niece does play that, and her boyfriend was able to connect with people um that would hook up in you know, trade sell or whatever. It's easier easily to do without getting caught some spooks. It's there for a second and then it moves on in the conversation snap said in a statement that it's completely prohibited to use Snapchat for any illegal activities and that accounts selling drugs are an intentional

abuse of the company's terms of service. It added that such accounts are removed when they're reported, and Epic Games, which makes the game Fortnite, declined to comment. In the meantime, Alien had started searching proactively for counterfeit drugs for sale on Instagram and was reporting them to the company. This went on for a few years. Ailien said she reported tons of violating accounts that were very obviously showcasing drugs

for sale. Instagram's content moderators either didn't respond or Eileen would get these generic acknowledgements, saying the post she was reporting weren't violating any of their rules. We saw the screenshots. The crisis got worse, and it got worse, and it got worse. I would go in, I would open the app, and I would report on like three to four like drug dealers, and I would document everything, and it just

nothing was changing, Nothing was changing. Eventually, the FDA started speaking publicly about the role tech companies with playing in the opioid crisis last year. In April, Scott Gottlieb, who was the f d A commissioner at the time, called out Facebook and Instagram by name, along with some of the other large tech firms. He called on the company's to do a better job of monitoring illegal opioid sales being advertised on their platforms, and he called for a

change of mindset across the industry. The f d A told us that approximately nineties six percent of online pharmacies selling prescription medicines to US consumers are illegal. The FDA also said it screens thousands of parcels at international mail facilities and has taken action against dozens of websites marketing

unapproved opioids in an effort to combat the crisis. Meanwhile, around seventeen and into Facebook started to be criticized for all sorts of content specific issues, from violent videos that would go viral to fake news spread by Russian backed groups ahead of the US presidential election. Aileen wondered why isn't anyone at the company doing anything still about the sale of drugs on Instagram. In an effort to get noticed, she started messaging Facebook executives on Twitter. One day, someone

finally responded. It was Guy Rosen, a VP at Facebook, in charge of figuring out how to automate a lot of the company's content decisions. He had sent her a direct message. Eileen showed me screenshots of their conversation. She wrote, do a search for hashtag fentinel as well as hashtag box eyes on I G and you'll see lots of picks of pills. Those accounts are usually drug dealers. I reported these earlier and they are still there. In the

hashtag opiate search there are forty three thousand results. Eileen also sent examples of the kinds of Instagram plast she was talking about. Guy wrote back to her, yigs, He said, this is super helpful. Finally, five years after she first started badgering Facebook and Instagram, some one was paying attention. The searchable hashtags were taken down one day before Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress about data privacy issues

and Russian election interference. Towards the end of a handful of counties in the regions hit hardest by the opioid crisis reported that there had been a decline in overdose deaths in recent months. We asked Jessica, the addiction counselor in Indiana, whether she thought that action by the social media companies could have helped. Well, of course it would be useful, but I don't know that it would be successful. Uh. The drug dealers, kids seeking or you know, individual seeking substances,

they always find a way around um this situation. So if these kids just re up on a different site under a different name. You know, one of my clients have got four different Facebook identities, so when one gets a down a discus through to another. Then at some point the hashtags that Aileen had helped to block went back up. We're not sure why those hashtags became available again, but by then people seem to be making new hashtags anyway, presumably to get around the fact that some popular ones

have been blocked. The other day, I was able to find drugs for sale under misspellings of the drug names like oxy cotton spelled c O T T O N, and I noticed a lot of comments about drugs for sale under pictures of drugs that people might have actually been prescribed. When I was looking, I found I was being redirected to information about recovery and support groups, so actually helpful content and sometimes but not all the time.

When I tried searching for drug related hashtags, I would get an automated message from Instagram asking if I needed any help. That's a relatively new feature that was rolled out in the fall. Facebook also said it has been using computer imaging technology to find and remove drug content before anyone sees it. It's part of a new goal to rely on more artificial intelligence for content moderation. The company singled out hate speech, violence, and graphic content as

specific areas where it has seen some improvement. Today. Alien doesn't use Instagram or Facebook. She says it causes her anxiety to even think about it. She was clearly deeply moved and also emotionally drained by this experience of caring about something nobody else really seems to be paying attention to. It's so frustrating to know that nothing is being done,

and so I couldn't I couldn't keep doing it. I couldn't keep reporting to them about it because A there's no direct line, so there's no way to actually get in touch with people there and be It's kind of hopeless if the people at the company don't care about it. Eileen wants the executive a Facebook and Instagram to face consequences I think that the there has not been true progress on this because nobody at Instagram is in a

criminal court proceeding. If the founder of the Silk Road is in jail for drug trafficking, why do social media companies that are making billions of dollars get a free pass to allow and again like support, the trafficking of the legal narcotics that are killing us. We tried to talk to an executive from Facebook about this issue, but

they declined our request for an interview. Meanwhile, Facebook CEOO Cheryl Sandbook was actually asked about the company's responsibility when it comes to drug sales in a congressional hearing in September. It was a question from Senator Joe Mansion of West Virginia. He made a direct link between section two thirty that law, which says platforms are not responsible for what uses post

and the number of people overdosing on illegal drugs. To what extent do you bear responsibility for the death of a drug user if they overdosed on drugs received through your platform? Either one. I'm happy to go. This is really important to us. The opioid crisis has been devastating and takes the lives of people in our country and around the world. It's firmly against our policies to buy or sell any pharmaceuticals on Facebook, and that includes opioid drugs.

We rely on a combination of machines and people reporting to take things down, and I think we've seen market improved geryld Standberg didn't really answer the senator's question, and neither did CEO Mark Zuckerberg when West Virginia Congressman David McKinley asked about it during a separate appearance before Congress a year ago. So my question to you is, when are you going to stop take down these posts? They're done on it with illegal digital pharmacies. When are you

going to take them down? Congressman? Right now, when people report the post us, we will take them down and have people Why do they have to if you've got all these twenty thousand people, you know that they're up there, Where is your requiring, where where is your accountability to

allow this to be occurring, this ravaging this country? Congressman, I agree that this is a terrible issue, And respectfully, when they're tens of billions or a hundred billion pieces of content that are shared every day, even twenty people reviewing it can't look at everything. What we need to do is build more AI tools that can proactively been before you're going to take them down. And you have it.

And so, Sarah, You've spent months reporting this story, and I'm curious, what do you make of Mark Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook needs AI tools to be able to monitor content about drugs and other things. Well, I do think Facebook wants to delve into this issue with AI, but it's very slow going and it's never going to be perfect.

The other thing I would note is if you are at the head of Facebook and Facebook is your flagship product and Instagram is the smaller product, and this is an issue that is maybe more specific to Instagram, it just may not seem like the priority for investing AI tools in. We've seen Facebook invest in counter terrorism, We've seen them invest in guns, We've seen them invest in hate speech because of that genocide and Myanmar that was

that was perpetuated by post on Facebook. But so far, though we've seen some change, I haven't seen a mobilization in on illegal drugs the way I've seen all those other issues. Yeah, And it's hard to understand that because when you think about how deadly the opioid crisis has been in the US, it's in a way you might ask, what issue is there that's that could be more urgent? What do you think of the chances that the government might force Facebook by passing some new regulations to take

more action on this. For the first time in a very long time, politicians feel like they can be outspoken and critical of tech companies. I think you're right that it's one of the only bipartisan issues in Congress right now is to critique chech companies about how terrible they are at policing content. But you know, I've listened to those hearings, and everyone has their different pet issue that

they care deeply about. The senators from West Virginia care about this issue, but other senators care more about bias against conservatives or against liberals. Others care more about discrimination and ads. Others care more about the live shooting like the one we recently experienced in New Zealand. I haven't seen a coalition to come together. I think the best chance we have, and what we've seen is the f d A come down hard on this and tell companies

they need to get their act together. Scott Gottlieb has been a force on this, but he just left the f d A, so I'm not sure if the next leadership is going to be as on top of this issue. Hopefully they are. Well, I know you'll keep proposing on this very very important issue. So thanks for sharing, you're reporting with us, Sarah, and that's it for this week's

episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, the Department of Health and Human Services has a twenty four hour national helpline where you can find information and treatment referral. The number is six six to H E L P. And if you have a story to share, you can reach me on Twitter. I'm at Sarah Fryar and I'm at Pia Gadcari. And please help us spread the word about on new season by leaving us a rating or a review wherever

you like to listen. This episode was produced by Pierre Gadcari and Lindsay Cratterwell. Our story editor was Emily Busso. Thank you also to Anne Vandermay, Aki Ito and Brad Stone, as well as Liz Smith, Magnus Henriksson, and TOFO Foreheads Francesca Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.