How Facebook Groups Became a Bizarre Bazaar for Elephant Tusks

Mark Zuckerberg had already been testifying for four hours in the stuffy, wood-paneled room where the House Energy and Commerce Committee held its hearing on Facebook in April, when he got a question he seemed wholly unprepared to answer. Zuckerberg’s answer or lack thereof revealed just how far down Facebook's to-do list wildlife trafficking ranks. When news broke last fall that the company had sold thousands of political ads to Russian propagandists in the runup to the 2016 election, Facebook announced it would double its content moderation team to 20,000 people, impose strict verification processes for political advertisers, and create massive repositories of political ads, complete with information on how much they cost, who paid for them, and what demographics they reached. This spring, when the world found out that a data firm called Cambridge Analytica had amassed data on as many as 87 million Americans without their permission through a silly third-party quiz app, Facebook radically limited app developers’ data access and announced it would be auditing how all apps use Facebook user data, even if it means hiring thousands more people. As Facebook executives recently explained to WIRED, the company has also overhauled its News Feed algorithms to reduce people’s exposure to fake news and outlets it deems untrustworthy.