There are some things that Facebook has rightly censored, and it isn’t conservative speech.
A Facebook user by the name of Abu Assad Almani, a German foreign fighter, used his Facebook page to try and sell two different women for $8,000.
The Washington Post reported:
The woman is young, perhaps 18, with olive skin and dark bangs that droop onto her face. In the Facebook photo, she attempts to smile but doesn’t look at her photographer.
The caption mentions a single biographical fact: She is for sale.
“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” begins the May 20 Facebook posting, which was attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young face with weepy red eyes.
“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads. “Yay, or nay?”
The photos of the women were taken down by Facebook within a few hours. But some users had already angrily commented on the posts -- but not for reasons you may think. There was a heated discussion between Almani and individuals who openly doubted the $8,000 price was reasonable. Some mocked the girls’ appearance, while others chastised Almani for allowing the women to appear in the photos without their veil.
One user asked, “Does she have a special skill?” in reference to the reasoning behind the four-figure price. The ISIS member responded with a simple “no” and stated that it was because of “demand and supply” that “makes her that price.”
This isn’t the first time a social media site has been used by ISIS to push their tyrannical agenda. Various websites have been used for the buying and selling of sex slaves for months, along with the distribution of a formal guidebook of how to treat a sex slave and what can be done to them. The rules cover topics ranging from having intercourse with a prepubescent woman sex slave to how badly the sex slave can be beaten. But The Washington Post reports that until the May 20 incident, there was no record of photos of the female prisoners being posted.
As economic conditions worsen for the jihadists, the treatment of women declines with it. The report added:
“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yazidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Meanwhile, ISIS’s restrictions on [non-enslaved] Sunni women cut them off from normal life and services almost entirely.