Facebook is facing a probe from Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s office over black-market groups on its website helping illegal migrants unlawfully obtain work.
Some of the illicit Facebook groups have been explicit about their intent, with names such as “UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WORLDWIDE” that involve illegal migrants paying to use legal ridesharing drivers’ credentials for jobs that should be off-limits to them because of their unlawful entry into the US.
“Turning a blind eye to these groups operating on your platform is just the latest in many instances of Meta choosing profit over the wellbeing of American consumers,” Blackburn (R-Tenn.) recently wrote in a scathing letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Blackburn is demanding answers from Facebook’s parent company Meta about the policies it has in place to restrict users from fraudulent activity.
She is also demanding data on the number of users booted from the platform over such fraud, an accounting of Facebook groups that enable ridesharing fraud, whether Facebook groups can be made “secret” to dodge such scrutiny and internal documents about the issue generally.
Blackburn gave the company a deadline of May 6 to comply with her demands.
Last year, Blackburn, 72, teamed up with Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) and former Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) to scrutinize food-ordering platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub over steps they were taking to ensure illegal migrants aren’t working for them.
That inquiry was inspired by a report from The Post about how migrants in New York City were buying access to credentials from legal workers to ridesharing platforms to make money.
Those three companies eventually began implementing “more robust driver verification processes.”
But recent research has uncovered how illegal migrants are working to bypass some of those safeguards by coordinating with legal workers in black-market Facebook groups.
Facebook has tried to thwart some of the groups such as “UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WORLDWIDE,” but researchers claim that there are still more than 80 similar illicit collectives on the social-media site, CNN reported.
“The unvetted use of these accounts is incredibly dangerous for American consumers, specifically women and children, and I urge you to immediately remove each of these Facebook groups and better enforce existing rules against fraud and deceptive practices,” Blackburn said in her letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
Beyond illegal immigrants fraudulently being able to obtain work in the US, Blackburn expressed safety concerns about users getting services from potentially violent individuals who have not been vetted.
“In one disturbing account, a woman was allegedly raped after ordering an Uber Eats delivery to her home,” the Tennessee senator recounted, referring to the Massachusetts case of Roiber Andres Rodriguez Melendez, a Columbian national accused of raping a female customer in February.
“The application had indicated that a woman would be delivering her order, but instead an illegal immigrant with horrific intentions arrived at her door.”
Earlier this year, ahead of President Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to Facebook’s controversial content moderation policies over concerns that there had been “too many mistakes” and too much “censorship.”
Among those changes, which were intended to steer the company back more in the direction of free speech, was a plan to dial back some of the filters that scan for policy violations so that they require “much higher confidence before taking down content,” Zuckerberg said.
“The reality is that this is a tradeoff,” the Meta boss explained at the time. “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but it will also reduce the number of innocent people’s accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Meta did not respond to a Post request for comment.
Blackburn, who has served in the Senate since 2018 after a 16-year stretch in the House of Representatives, said earlier this year that she is giving “serious consideration” to potentially mounting a bid for governor of Tennessee.
