Small arms, light weapons sold via Facebook, WhatsApp

Data collected by Armament Research Services (ARES), inaugurated by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, on Monday, revealed that Facebook and WhatsApp were increasingly being used to sell weapons like AK-47.
The data contains information about groups and individual traders active on popular social media and communication platforms.
It showed that the social medium also truck-mounted machine guns in war-ravaged Libya.
ARES, which produced significant original research examining the online trade in small arms and light weapons within Libya, said on its website that the project would consist of two published reports, released under Small Arms Survey’s Security Assessment in North Africa (SANA) programme.
The first, a shorter report, had already been released by Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research institute, also available on the website.
It said that a longer-form report would be released in the coming months.
The Dispatch, titled ‘The Online Trade of Light Weapons in Libya’ was, however, restricted to light weapons and explored the regional distribution of online sales and examined the availability of these systems in Libya.
According to ARES, the Dispatch undertakes detailed examination of the light weapons offered for sale, including their specific types and designations and their countries of origin.
The Working Paper would be substantially longer and would assess both small arms and light weapons.
The Dispatch is intended to supplement the findings of the forthcoming longer report and draws on a broader range of entries in the ARES CONMAT Database, assessing 97 light weapons documented over an 18-month period (September 2014–March 2016).
The ARES database itself contains many thousands of entries, only a portion of which relate to illicit materiel traded online. It includes examples of arms traded via social media and communications platforms in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and other countries.
The database consists of several thousand entries from multiple countries, documented over a number of years, with new additions on a daily basis.