Human smugglers and traffickers effectively use social media platforms to reach potential migrants, offering a much easier, albeit dangerous, path than navigating complex official visa processes. Their speed and reach far exceed government communication efforts, often spreading disinformation to exploit vulnerable people.
Related Insights
Many foreign-based social media accounts promoting extremist views aren't state-sponsored propaganda. Instead, they are run by individuals in developing nations who have discovered that inflammatory content is the easiest way to gain followers and monetize their accounts. This reframes the issue from purely geopolitical influence to include economic opportunism.
Organized crime in Latin America is evolving as drug gangs diversify their portfolios into human trafficking. They repurpose existing infrastructure, such as corrupt official contacts and money laundering networks built for the cocaine trade, to run these new operations. This strategic shift has turned previously separate criminal networks into interconnected 'best friends.'
A coming battle will focus on 'malinformation'—facts that are true but inconvenient to established power structures. Expect coordinated international efforts to pressure social media platforms into censoring this content at key chokepoints.
Denmark pioneered a strategy of "negative nation branding" to discourage asylum applications. This involves deliberately publicizing harsh policies, such as confiscating asylum seekers' jewelry, to make the country appear as unattractive as possible to potential migrants, thereby managing immigration through perception control.
The pandemic accelerated traffickers' shift to online recruitment, which proved more effective for psychological control. Gangs use social media to build trust, gather personal details about victims and their families, and then use that information as leverage. This digital entrapment makes escape significantly harder, as victims face credible threats against their loved ones.
Extremist figures are not organic phenomena but are actively amplified by social media algorithms that prioritize incendiary content for engagement. This process elevates noxious ideas far beyond their natural reach, effectively manufacturing influence for profit and normalizing extremism.
Drug trafficking has shifted from vertically integrated cartels to a fluid network of specialized subcontractors. This model, similar to tech manufacturing, makes the supply chain more resilient to disruption and fosters innovation in cultivation, smuggling, and money laundering, making it harder for law enforcement to disrupt.
Many temporary workers would prefer to return home between jobs but remain in a host country illegally because they fear the high cost and danger of re-entering for the next work season. Creating safe, legal, and reliable re-entry pathways could significantly reduce irregular overstays.
While platforms spent years developing complex AI for content moderation, X implemented a simple transparency feature showing a user's country of origin. This immediately exposed foreign troll farms posing as domestic political actors, proving that simple, direct transparency can be more effective at combating misinformation than opaque, complex technological solutions.
Social influence has become even more concentrated in the hands of a few. While the 'super spreader' phenomenon has always existed for ideas and diseases, modern technology dramatically enhances their power by increasing their reach and, crucially, making them easier for others to identify and target.
