Victims see their content removed from Instagram unless they pay steep ransoms.

Illustration by Martin Lacko

In May 2023, Esaa Ahmed-Adnan, an Iraqi social media influencer who’s amassed more than 500,000 followers on Instagram with his videos about environmental issues, received a curious message from the platform. A sponsored post for a local restaurant he’d made had been taken down after being flagged for a copyright violation. Ahmed-Adnan, who knew to avoid doing things likely to inspire trouble, such as adding copyrighted music to his posts, was confused. This particular video consisted entirely of him touring the restaurant and trying various dishes.

Not long after, other videos started disappearing: A post he made promoting an area volunteer effort to clean up the Tigris River, which flows through Baghdad, was also flagged for a copyright violation. That video showed him talking directly to the camera while helping to pick up trash from the banks of the river and, again, featured no copyrighted music.

Via WhatsApp, Ahmed-Adnan got in touch with the person who flagged his posts, who claimed to be the owner of an intellectual-property protection business. He acknowledged that Ahmed-Adnan’s post wasn’t actually violating anyone’s copyright and suggested he could restore the content for $3,000, about as much as Ahmed-Adnan makes in a month.

In an offer that came with an implicit threat, the person told Ahmed-Adnan there was also the option of paying for continuous protection against phony copyright takedown orders, at a cost of $1,000 per month or $7,000 per year. The person also sent a screenshot to underscore what Ahmed-Adnan was up against. It showed a tool that Instagram and Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. offers to help content owners automatically identify violating content so it can be pulled from its platforms. The image showed some of Ahmed-Adnan’s content highlighted, along with a takedown request.

This kind of copyright trolling has spread across the Middle East. Smith Mehta, a professor who studies the global creator economy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, says he sees it as evidence that Meta, in its eagerness to expand globally, often neglects to dedicate resources to policing its products in the developing world. “They just put the platform out there and then see how the traffic comes in,” he says, echoing criticism others have made about Meta’s content moderation practices. “When the traffic is lucrative enough, the platforms decide that they need to have a much more cohesive regulatory and transparency system in place. But at the moment, they don’t feel the need.” (Meta makes about 15 times as much revenue per user in the US and Canada as it does in the rest of the world, according to financial filings.)

In an email, a Meta spokesperson said the company prohibits users from uploading other people’s content and claiming it as their own. “We routinely revoke access or disable accounts when we identify cases of misuse,” the spokesperson added, noting that Meta’s rights management tools are global, “and we invest heavily in them so people around the world can protect their rights and manage their content at scale.”

Conflict over copyright has been a vexing problem for social media companies from the beginning. Facing an existential wave of litigation after being acquired by Google, YouTube introduced a technology in 2007 called ContentID, which scanned its platform for material that may violate copyright, then offered content owners the choice of having it removed or receiving a cut of the advertising revenue it generated. Facebook dealt with a similar problem when it shifted focus to video several years later and YouTube creators complained that scammers were reposting their videos on the social media site. “This is not insignificant; it’s the vast majority of Facebook’s high-volume traffic,” the popular YouTuber Hank Green wrote in a 2015 article titled “Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video.” The next year, Facebook introduced its own tool, called Rights Manager.

These tools were critical in turning Meta and Google into trillion-dollar advertising companies. But they also created an opening for copyright trolls and other bad-faith actors, who saw a financial opportunity in flagging content that doesn’t really violate intellectual-property rights. Creating the tools was clearly not going to be enough; the companies would almost certainly have to monitor their use in perpetuity.

Extortion schemes targeting social media users can have significant consequences in places like the Middle East, where Meta’s products are widely used to disseminate information in ways that weren’t possible before they existed. Yet influencers in the region today complain that the company makes legitimate access to Rights Manager too difficult to obtain, with even people and organizations whose follower counts stretch into the millions seeing their applications rejected without explanation.

The Meta spokesperson said the company is selective about whom it approves for Rights Manager, to “ensure that only legitimate rights holders have access to this tool.” But a black market has emerged and made it easier for the tool to fall into the wrong hands. On multiple Facebook groups, some open to the public, users sell Instagram and Facebook accounts with access to Rights Manager for as much as $3,000. These are often accounts that had secured legitimate access and were subsequently hacked. Active users on various groups are located around the world but mostly in developing countries where scammers are less likely to catch Meta’s attention. The administrators of the largest group, which has 1,000 members, live in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Dubai, according to their user profiles.

When Bloomberg Businessweek reported groups it had found to Meta, the company removed them, saying they violated its terms and conditions. (Some have since reappeared.)

Once people gain access to Rights Manager, they can rip video, picture or audio files from an influencer’s account and upload it, sparking automated takedown requests that go to the original creators. Then the phony copyright holders contact their victims to explain what it will cost to make their problems go away.

Dealing with the impact of these schemes has fallen in part to Meta’s Trusted Partner Network, local experts whom the company has deputized to help identify local and national trends in misinformation and imminent threats to its users’ physical safety. These partners have a special reporting channel to flag posts and accounts, and they occasionally meet with Meta staffers to discuss regional content policy issues.

Aws al-Saadi, the founder of Tech4Peace, an Iraqi nonprofit that’s part of the network and focuses on digital rights, says he’s helped more than 100 people across the Middle East deal with the problem of rights management abuse since May 2023. Meta often restores the accounts, but it can take time, and some victims feel they can’t afford to wait. “It usually takes one month for Meta to help, but some people say they want help on the same day—otherwise they’ll lose access to their page and the way they make money,” he says.

Al-Saadi says dozens of influencers have ended up paying, and estimates their extortionists could have made as much as $1 million from the scam. He says that Meta hasn’t taken even basic steps to prevent the problem and that the company should at least ban IP addresses associated with accounts that have abused the tool.

Targets have included hospitals, social activists, fashion models and other business owners. Saif Sami, the owner of a boutique hotel in Iraq, says an extortionist took down more than 32 of his videos and crippled his ability to publicize his business through his page. During that period his vacancy rates rose significantly, and he estimates he lost at least $30,000 in revenue.

One of the most prominent victims was the Iraqi cleric and politician Ammar Al-Hakim, who’d applied for access to the tool multiple times, according to a spokesperson. Rather than asking for money directly, his attackers requested an audience with the cleric. Al-Hakim’s staff refused, and the videos remained inaccessible.

Al-Saadi says that Meta told him it would look into the issue when he raised it at a conference in October, but that more recently it asked him to stop prioritizing reporting copyright trolls—it didn’t fall within his responsibilities, he says the company told him. Another trusted partner says the company “showed little interest in addressing the issue or discussing it in detail.”

Meta disputed al-Saadi’s contention that global IP issues were no longer a priority and said the platform’s teams are continuing to work with Tech4Peace on reports of abuse of the tool.

Tech4Peace was able to help Ahmed-Adnan get his content restored within a few days of his contacting the group, which he says he did after receiving only an automated reply from Meta saying it couldn’t help. But a few weeks later he received new takedown notifications and would eventually lose about $20,000 in advertising revenue because of the attacks, by his estimate. Ahmed-Adnan’s attacker seemed to revel in his dilemma. “You’re being foolish,” the person said in a message reviewed by Businessweek. “If you don’t pay within 24 hours, we’ll take out your account.” When he refused, the person taunted him. “Say goodbye to your video on Facebook. Say goodbye to it. One or two more videos and your Facebook page is gone.”