Summary:
In April 2016, a Buzzfeed News story showed how sketchy retailers used stolen images from across the web to sell ultra-discounted clothes to women on Facebook. These sellers thrived on Facebook where despite repeated attempts at policing and regulation, the network's weak policies and massive scale made it the ideal place to target women looking for a deal.
Allegations:
- The Buzzfeed News story illustrated how thousands of women lost money to an opaque group of Chinese clothing companies in recent years, operating under a trove of names like Zaful, SammyDress, DressLily. At least eight such sites were connected to one Chinese e-commerce company ShenZhen Global Egrow E-Commerce Co, which made more than $200 million in sales in 2014.
- Thousands of complaints against these fraudulent sites were made on TrustPilot, Site Jabber, the Better Business Bureau's website and more were lodged with the Federal Trade Commission.
- Facebook's monitoring did not extend to bad experiences users had once an ad click took them away from the site. They seemed to have thrown up their hands to say, "We don’t really have anything to do with our advertisers as long as they’re following our policies," Jasmine Griffeth, online content and marketing consultant in Calgary, said.
Defence:
- Facebook told BuzzFeed News that its rules around ads and pages were far more focused on language and images, and noted its policies prohibit stolen pictures and "deceptive, false or misleading content."
- Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's VP of Ads and Pages, told Buzzfeed News, "We’re looking at ways to incorporate new signals that will help us identify which of the over 50 million active businesses on our platform are delivering products and services that are overwhelmingly unsatisfactory to people."