Facebook to act on illegal sale of Amazon rainforest

By Joao Fellet and Charlotte Pamment

BBC Brasil

    The Amazon rainforest is home to one in 10 known species on Earth

Facebook says it will begin clamping down on the illegal sale of protected areas of the Amazon rainforest on its site.

The social media giant changed its policy following a BBC investigation into the practice.

The new measures will apply only to conservation areas and not to publicly owned forest.

And the move will be limited to the Amazon, not other rainforests and wildlife habitats across the world.

According to a recent study from the think tank Ipam (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambental da Amazonia), a third of all deforestation happens in publicly-owned forests in the Amazon.

Facebook said it would not reveal how it planned to find the illegal ads but said it would "seek to identify and block new listings" in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest.

Illegal deforestation exposed

In February, the BBC Our World documentary Selling the Amazon revealed that plots of rainforest as large as 1,000 football pitches were being listed on Facebook's classified ads service.

Alvim Souza Alves was trying to sell land for about £16,400

Many of the plots were inside protected areas, including national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples.

Read More