An investigation has explored Facebook's emergence as the leading platform for illegal wildlife trade.
Mongabay summarized the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime's report, titled "Wildlife Has a Facebook Problem." The authors alleged that the platform's basic design features allow it to function as the "ideal" illicit marketplace.
The study revealed how private groups, weak moderation, anonymous accounts, encrypted messaging, and algorithms are helping connect poachers, middlemen, and buyers.
This is no small industry. The researchers examined online wildlife trade activity between April 2024 and March 2026 across 10 countries and 61 online marketplaces known to be hotspots. In total, they identified over 265,000 wildlife products valued at around $66 million.
Approximately three-quarters of the ads were on Facebook, while other platforms, such as Etsy, Amazon, and eBay, made up much of the rest. Disturbingly, 84% of the animals for sale on Facebook were being offered illegally in commercial trade, per the report.
"There's just anything and everything on Facebook," said study co-author Russell Gray. "The world is really significantly underprepared for cyber trade in wildlife."
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Facebook is especially useful because users can create accounts and private groups with little meaningful verification.
Inside those groups, buyers and sellers can shift conversations into private messages, making deals much harder to track. Facebook's algorithms intensify the problem by recommending similar groups, pages, and contacts to users in the sphere.
It's taken a niche market and given it a mainstream hub that's great for business.
"Facebook groups really replaced a lot of different types of sites on the internet by providing this free infrastructure that was very good at marketing," said Simone Haysom, a co-author of the study.
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The report also criticized Meta's moderation efforts, which focus on English posts that comprise just 12% of the listings. Although Facebook formally bans the sale of endangered animals and animal parts, researchers said illegal listings were easy to find.
There's minimal oversight, networks can easily form, and participants in the trade are able to dodge consequences.
"We need regulation with teeth," Haysom told Mongabay. "Self-regulation has not worked … and is unlikely to be fully successful."
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