People traffickers have long used social media as a way to advertise their services to prospective clients who wish to illegally enter Europe. Now some are going even further by using social media ‘influencers’ in order to gain more attention online.
As part of their digital marketing strategy, social media profiles linked to traffickers have been found engaging in various tactics, such as calls to action in which the profile will state that they will be departing for Europe and those who wish to join have a limited time to do so, the newspaper Il Giornale has revealed.
The newspaper identified several profiles that appear to be from the social media platform Facebook, each having thousands of followers or ‘friends.’
Hajj Mohammed, one of the ‘influencers’ also downplays the dangers associated with crossing the Mediterranean, despite the Central Mediterranean route to Italy being the most dangerous route to Europe, with 1,453 migrants reported missing or dead last year and 1,545 missing or dead in 2021.
“There is a trip next week that will start from a 75-meter fibre boat, two Yamaha 25 engines, equipped with everything, life jacket, GPS,” the influencer writes.
Some of the influencers even post videos of their journey, with one account under the name Haj Jalal Abdullah regularly posting videos of gleeful migrants aboard motorboats in the Mediterranean.
Abdullah, who has amassed nearly 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook, includes his contact number alongside some of the videos for those who wish to make the dangerous journey while repeating the phrase “Our motto is safety everywhere.”
Behind the social media influencers are likely organised criminal people traffickers, some of whom are totally indifferent to the safety of the migrants and are well-known for overcrowding boats, a practice that can lead to shipwrecks.
Just a month ago, around 41 migrants died in a shipwreck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which due to its proximity to Tunisia is often the main target of people smugglers using small boats.
According to a BBC report, only 15 people on board the ship actually had access to life jackets but died anyway due to the severe weather at sea. Those who did survive were able to find another empty boat nearby and were adrift for days before they were found.
Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) explained, “Sub-Saharan migrants [leaving from Tunisia] are forced to use these low-cost iron boats which break after 20 or 30 hours of navigation. With this kind of sea, these boats capsize easily.”
Lampedusa has been the subject of global headlines in recent days after a record number of migrants arrived on over a hundred small boats, with the number of migrants arriving in just a few days exceeding the island’s population of just over 6,000.
Deputy mayor of the island, Attilio Lucia, spoke out about the arrivals saying, “These numbers lead me to think of an invasion rather than a migratory phenomenon. I feel like saying ‘enough.’”
Lucia later joined locals in protesting the situation by blocking roads on the island after it was suggested that a disused LORAN navigation system base be converted into a site to house migrants as the current “hot spot” has room for just 400 or so people and cannot cope with the numbers that have recently arrived.
“Let’s say enough is enough. No more reception centres, no more tent cities. Lampedusa, today, wakes up and says: ‘stop this situation.’ We cannot accommodate all these people, we are willing to stay night and day, in a fixed manner to monitor that no one enters with tents to create the tent city,” Lucia said.
While Lampedusa is a hub for illegal arrivals, it represents just a fraction of the total number of illegal arrivals to Italy this year, as the Central Mediterranean route now accounts for around half of all of the illegal entries into Europe, according to the European Union border agency Frontex.
The United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR reports that as of September 17th, a total of 128,608 migrants have arrived in Italy, the highest number since 2016.
