Facebook Has a Wildlife Trafficking Problem

A tiger tooth for £213. Tiger bones for around £380 a kilogram. Pangolin scales for $150 a kilogram. Shark fins shipped internationally. These were not hidden listings buried somewhere on the dark web. They were on Facebook.

In December 2025, a BBC investigation found endangered animals and their body parts openly advertised on the platform. One user posted videos of a tiger in a cage who was apparently for sale, alongside photographs of tiger bones and teeth. Another showed two live tiger cubs inside a box. One seller even told the BBC that his products could be shipped to the UK.

This is not a handful of criminals slipping through Facebook’s moderation system. New research suggests Facebook has become one of the central pieces of infrastructure behind the online illegal wildlife trade. And Facebook’s own algorithms may be helping people find it.

Nearly 3/4s of adverts were on Facebook

A report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime analysed almost two years of data from its Global Monitoring System. Between April 2024 and March 2026, researchers detected 21,904 adverts containing 266,535 wildlife products across 61 online platforms. Facebook accounted for 16,290 of them. That is more than 74% of all the illegal wildlife trade adverts detected. The next biggest platform, WhatsApp, accounted for just 5%. This was not primarily trade involving animals with relatively little protection either. Around 84% of the Facebook adverts involved species listed under CITES Appendix I, where international commercial trade is generally prohibited. Another 58.3% involved animals classified as endangered or critically endangered. Researchers found no evidence of permits or documentation accompanying the adverts.

Elephants are killed for their ivory. Rhinos for their horns. Pangolins for their scales. Parrots, primates, reptiles and other animals are captured and sold into the exotic animal trade. The internet has made finding buyers considerably easier.

Facebook doesn’t just host the trade

There is an important difference between criminals using a website and the website helping criminals find one another. Facebook groups accounted for 76% of the adverts detected on the platform. These groups can effectively create ready-made communities of buyers and sellers, sometimes organised around particular animals or products. Sellers can then advertise across numerous similar groups. But people do not necessarily have to go searching for this content. Researchers encountered 78% of Facebook detections without actively searching for them. This included content encountered through groups and content promoted algorithmically. Once somebody joins certain groups or follows certain pages, Facebook’s recommendation system can recognise similar material and continue feeding it to them.

Researchers separately recorded 542 explicit recommendation events where illegal wildlife trade-related accounts, groups, posts or sponsored content were promoted through platform systems. Someone does not necessarily search Facebook for an endangered animal. Facebook can help lead them there. This is what makes the problem much bigger than inadequate moderation. Facebook is not simply failing to remove every prohibited advert uploaded by billions of users. Features deliberately designed to increase engagement and help people discover content can also help connect wildlife traffickers with potential customers.

Facebook has known about the problem for years

Facebook co-founded the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online in 2018 and committed to reducing illegal online wildlife trade by 80% by 2020. It subsequently introduced policies banning trade in endangered species, reporting tools and warnings telling users that selling endangered animals is illegal. But researchers found the trade continued. Previous investigations cited in the report found no meaningful reduction after the policy changes, while illegal wildlife activity on Facebook was reported to have increased after 2018. More than half of newly identified animal-sale pages and groups had apparently been created after Facebook joined the coalition.

Meta’s own moderation systems do not appear particularly reliable either. The report describes researchers reporting a publicly visible Facebook group involving pangolins and scales. Facebook rejected the report.

Another investigation cited by the researchers found Facebook appeared automatically to remove only 13% of detected illegal wildlife trade posts. After researchers manually reported the rest, only 43% had disappeared a week later. Meta says its rules prohibit attempts to buy, sell or trade endangered species and their body parts. The problem is not a lack of rules. It is what happens after those rules are written.

Facebook may even be monetising the people involved

Perhaps the most extraordinary example documented in the report involved a Facebook page with roughly 195,000 followers. Its content centred on hunting and displaying animals including pangolins, clouded leopards, gibbons and other threatened species. The account was linked to a Facebook group with around 72,600 members dedicated to poaching activity. And the page had Facebook Subscriptions enabled.

Subscriptions are not simply an ordinary feature available indiscriminately to every account. Meta says creators using its monetisation systems must satisfy eligibility requirements and comply with its policies. But researchers found a subscription-enabled account sitting inside what they described as a huge poaching-linked ecosystem. The report does not claim this proves widespread monetisation of wildlife trafficking. Researchers acknowledge they do not systematically track which accounts have subscription tools enabled.

But even one documented example raises an obvious question.

How does an account centred on killing threatened animals pass a system supposedly designed to determine whether somebody is suitable to make money through Facebook?

The animals are already reaching Britain

The trade is not somebody else’s problem happening thousands of miles away. The BBC investigation found sellers offering to ship tiger parts and shark fins to the UK. It also found British businesses selling dried seahorses.

A reporter ordered some.

Two days later, 15 dead seahorses arrived through the post with no documentation showing where they had come from. Three were pregnant males. Male seahorses can carry hundreds of young. Meanwhile, a Facebook user in Laos offered pangolin scales, while another user advertised rhino horn through the platform.

Interpol describes wildlife trafficking as one of the world’s largest forms of international crime. During one month-long operation involving authorities in 134 countries, almost 30,000 live animals and 30 tonnes of animal parts were seized. Those seizures included thousands of shark fins, hundreds of kilograms of giraffe flesh and animals hidden inside vehicles heading across borders. What gets intercepted only shows us part of the trade.

Self-regulation has failed

There are limitations to the new report.

Researchers tracked adverts, not completed transactions. Advertised prices do not prove that somebody ultimately paid them, and the monitoring did not cover every country or every online platform. But the scale is difficult to dismiss. Nearly 22,000 suspected illegal wildlife trade adverts. More than 266,000 wildlife products. Almost three quarters of the adverts appearing on Facebook. Groups functioning as marketplaces. Illegal content being recommended to users. And even an account connected to a huge poaching community gaining access to Facebook’s own subscription system.

Facebook has had policies, pledges, partnerships and warnings for years.

The animals being captured, sold and killed do not need another corporate promise. The evidence suggests voluntary self-regulation has had its chance. It is time Facebook was made responsible not only for removing illegal wildlife trafficking when somebody happens to report it, but for ensuring its algorithms, groups and monetisation systems are not helping the trade grow in the first place.