The contemporary internet has become the transnational marketplace for the sale and trafficking of illicit products, from drugs and guns to malware and stolen user information. Given the scale of these activities, these marketplaces have drawn the attention of international and national law enforcement bodies as well as scholars of cybersecurity and criminal activities. As such, these platforms have moved to the ‘dark web’ or other encrypted communication channels and separated from the ‘surface web’ platforms run by global platform companies, which are the increasing focus of both government regulation and scholars of data privacy law. Among such illicit goods, one is often ignored though globally traded via established marketplaces on social media platforms: looted antiquities. Although representing only a portion of an already small global illicit trafficking network, such activities on internet platforms, particularly Facebook, can cause immense damage to archaeological and cultural heritage sites. Such marketplaces on major internet platforms provide a unique case study in global data privacy and cybersecurity law that has largely gone unstudied. This paper analyzes the trafficking of illicitly acquired antiquities on a variety of internet platforms—particularly Facebook—as an illustration of issues with both the current framework of global data privacy law and the moderation and regulation of such transnational criminal activity. This note will review and critique the existing literature on platform moderation and digital infrastructure and propose and examine various solutions to the mechanisms by which illicit activities endure, specifically by focusing on the potential of multistakeholder collaboration to bring effectively targeted moderation to the trade in illicit antiquities online.
Published in the New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol. 54 (2022), pp. 659-698. It received the journal’s award for the best student note published in the spring 2022 edition of the publication.
This paper originated in the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations convened by Thomas Streinz and Joseph Weiler in fall 2020.
