Even legislators are apparently fed up with the mess on Facebook Marketplace. A group of lawmakers on Thursday last week brought their frustration to their peers, grilling regulatory officials over how they plan to address the onslaught of scams and advertisements verging on pornography.
Their concerns are not unfounded. Anyone can log into Facebook and see for themselves the sorry state of the supposedly peer-to-peer sales platform. Rarely are prices realistic, with the majority of listings either free, NT$1 or NT$100, no matter if the product is a set of containers or an iPad. Most are posted by users who just joined Facebook — another red flag.
The devolution of the platform is bad for everyone involved, except maybe the scammers themselves. Buyers have to sort through piles of rubbish and dodge scams to find the occasional good deal, while genuine sellers have to try and undercut fake postings. Facebook, too, loses ground in the rush to break into a burgeoning e-commerce industry inflated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as people lose faith in the platform.
For all their concerns, the legislators did not offer concrete solutions on what to do about it. As many countries are fully aware, regulating a social media juggernaut such as Facebook is not so straightforward when the company is based elsewhere. Even in the US, a lengthy debate continues about how to handle a company as wealthy and influential as a nation.
Among their loose suggestions to somehow block posts or create an oversight entity, their most useful message to the National Communications Commission (NCC) actually sounded like the most flippant: Regulators have to “muster the courage” to stand up to Facebook.
The company has proven itself to be reactionary, especially in foreign markets, responding to concerns only when pressed. If the government is serious about cleaning up Marketplace, it needs to make its stance clear.
There is reason to believe that Facebook will listen. Taiwan is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — per capita market for the company, with an 82 percent penetration rate as of 2017, compared with 66 percent in the US at the time. It also has a history of working with local groups to combat misinformation, partnering with the Taiwan FactCheck Center and MyGoPen for its Third-Party Fact-Checking Program from last year, and offering digital literacy workshops through its “We Think Digital” initiative. It also held a news literacy conference and a hackathon last year to encourage innovative solutions to the misinformation problem.
However, legislators said that messages of concern from the company’s own local office as well as policymakers about Marketplace scams are going unanswered. As it is only a marketing office, it reportedly does not have the authority to respond to user complaints, and can only forward them to corporate headquarters.
Meanwhile, the NCC and the Department of Commerce are “kicking the ball back and forth” on who is responsible, they said.
If Facebook continues to turn a blind eye, the government should consider playing hardball. It might look to Australia or the EU for inspiration and threaten to shut down Marketplace if nothing is done, forcing Facebook to the table. The NCC should also step up and complete its digital communications bill, which would hold social media companies accountable for responding to regulatory requests and make it easy for users to file complaints.
Marketplace is just the tip of the iceberg. Misinformation, bullying and extremism still run rampant on Facebook and other social media platforms, leaving regulators scrambling to catch up as the landscape keeps shifting under their feet. However, this does not preclude taking even small actions to improve people’s online lives, especially when all it takes is a little courage.
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