Facebook Says a 'Technical Issue' Caused Drugs, Animals and Other Illegal Listings To Flood Its New Craigslist Competitor (businessinsider.com)

On Monday, Facebook launched Marketplace, its own take on eBay and Craigslist to offer users a platform to buy and sell things. Less than a day later, the company said there was a "technical issue" that caused drugs, animals, adult services, and other illegal items to appear in Marketplace. Business Insider reports: In a statement to Business Insider, Facebook director of product management Mary Ku said the company is "working to fix the problem" and "closely monitoring our systems to ensure we are properly identifying and removing violations before giving more people access to Marketplace." To police what is sold in Marketplace, a Facebook spokesperson previously told us that the social network will rely on its employees proactively looking for offensive listings as well as users reporting posts they think should be removed.

Comments

Hubris

[Comboman]

It's the height of hubris for Facebook to assume that can rely on the network effect from their huge membership to quickly and easily reproduce what took eBay, Amazon and Craigslist decades to develop (and even they still mess it up on a fairly frequent basis). In a year this mess will join the likes of Facebook Deals, Facebook Credits & Facebook Gifts on the scrapheap of Facebook's attempts to expand beyond social networking by creating a poor implementation of someone else's idea.