Watchdogs: An interview with ATHAR co-founder and activist Amr Al Azm
Image courtesy: ATHAR Project / Facebook
ATHAR co-founder points to Facebook as “the single largest repository of looted antiquities”
Watchdog group ATHAR was founded in response to the trafficking of Syrian cultural artefacts from the country during conflict. The group works to fight a bloated black market of illicit antiquities and the lenient online platforms enabling it. In 2019, a report released by ATHAR resulted in a public policy change from Meta, which ‘banned’ the sale of cultural heritage across its platforms. Now, five years after this alleged change, Sohaila Ahmed and I had the chance to speak with co-founder of the project Amr Al Azm to discuss their work and the promises from the silicon giant.
Q&A
Amr Al Azm: Most of our research is focused on Facebook which is really, really protective. If you can actually run an automated scraper that will just gather data for you, it's much easier. Whereas on Facebook, you can't do that. It's really hard. We've been working with a group of experts from HBKU [Hamad Bin Khalifa University] here in Doha who developed this scraper that, sort of, works on [Facebook] marketplace, but we haven't tried it on actual groups in Facebook. And even that, we're not sure how long it will let us scrape. So we're going to run tests on dummy accounts to see. Can you run it for one hour, five hours, one day, five days, one month, one year? Whatever it is, without it being flagged as a scraper and shut down. So we're going to run some tests in the coming months.
Q. At the time of the reports release you were tracking 95 Facebook groups. What was the work behind this?
Amr Al Azm: The main thing is, a lot of it is literally by hand. It’s manual. But other than that, it's just finding the groups. We developed a lexicon of keywords: search words in Arabic and English and any other languages we're looking at. Because we're starting to look into Afghanistan and Pakistan now we're looking at Pashto, Dari and a few other languages. You create a series of keywords and you have to also know the slang, because often they'll use slang to get around (being flagged by) searches.You'd be surprised how much data it is. It's all open source, but it's very time consuming, very laborious. And until somebody manages to crack that code or the platforms themselves agree to cooperate, there's not much we can do.
Q. Are you able to tell us anything about the traffickers themselves? When do historical sites become more vulnerable to looting and who is involved?
Amr Al Azm: Anything from, what we call, subsistence looters. These are people who've lost their livelihoods because of war, conflict, poverty, disruptions in their region. To hardened criminals, to armed non-state actors who see this as a revenue stream.
Different parts of the world have different resources, and this is a resource that you can use to make money. For us, the most concerning is where that feeds into terrorism finance, because some of these groups are either affiliated with or are actually terrorist entities.
Q. Your work is best known for the 2019 report which pushed Facebook to make changes to its policies on the sale of cultural heritage. Has this ban changed the way that traffickers are using these platforms?
Amr Al Azm: They didn't ban anything. It's still all there. Still all happening. The revenue stream is too good for them. They'd rather pay the fines. There's no evolution because nothing's changed. At the time they said, “we're going to rely on self reporting.” And even then, we ran dummy tests. And they didn't take it down and rejected our reporting, even though it was clearly looted artefacts. Now we monitor over 600 [Facebook] groups, which contain over 7,000 - 800,000 people individually. And I think it's over 12, 13 million people now, just from the MENA region. So it's massive.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
The illicit trafficking of cultural artefacts deprives populations of their culture, history, and the ability to document and learn from unseen historical pieces. Fueling tension as a source of funding for organised crime and terrorism, the illicit trafficking of historical artefacts also threatens to deprive populations of their futures. Amr Al Azm continues to work both within and outside of ATHAR to raise awareness about this problem.