A day after Facebook launched its classifieds space Marketplace, multiple listings related to guns, alcohol, and animals started popping on its feed, leading the company to temporarily halt the global roll out of the product. Facebook said that this was due to a technical issue and that it was working on fixing it. The company will also improve its image recognition technology to identify illegal products before they’re uploaded and monitor its systems to identify and remove the violating listings before more people are given access to the Marketplace. It is hoping that along with its employees, its regular users will also report such listings to aid it in taking them down. What is prohibited on Facebook? Facebook says that items, products and services sold on its platform need to follow a commerce policy along with its community standards. Facebook’s content policies here. As of now, the commerce policy prohibits users from uploading illegal, prescription or recreational drugs; tobacco items; ‘unsafe supplements’; weapons, ammunition and explosives’ animals; adult items and services; alcohol; adult health items; real money gambling services; fraudulent, misleading, deceptive or offensive items or posts; ‘overtly sexualised positioning’ and non physical items like services, subscriptions, rentals and digital products among others. On the rollout of Marketplace, the company replaced the Messenger (which has 1 billion users) shortcut on the Facebook app with a Marketplace shortcut, where it is available: the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Facebook claimed that 450 million users checked out buy and sell Facebook Groups…
