Why Facebook Can Not Rescind the Ban on Animal Sales

Without defending Facebook, I can tell you that rescinding the animal sales ban is not as simple as it seems.

How can that be? They brought it in overnight, can’t they just say “animal sales are OK”, and stop deleting posts and ads?

They can’t change the rule now because animal sales just don’t belong in Marketplace.

While to Facebook users it appeared overnight, to Facebook a lot of work was spent behind the scenes, albeit not enough work, but they have been at it for at least 8 months. It’s not a matter of just saying it’s OK and ceasing to police the issue. The actual launch was back in October of 2016, but the tools offered to report animals for sale seem to have appeared after the fact. Awareness of the rule did not really gain momentum until April of 2017.

The content for Marketplace is obtained by Facebook through feeding items posted for sale in Buy & Sell groups and incorporating Marketplace paid ads into the current advertising options for Facebook pages and other advertisers.

The only way to lift the ban is for Facebook to roll out several new features that would allow the creation of group types specifically for animals and new features take months, even years to develop, beta test and roll-out. Even the new marketplace itself is still in the roll out phase, nearly ten months after it’s initial launch.

Sales of animals in groups was, in most cases, monitored by admins and members. Unscrupulous sellers were often called out and even reported to authorities at times. The Marketplace detaches the personal oversight and offers a far more anonymous way for puppy mills and other undesirables to reach bigger markets. Get reported and banned? Just make a new email address and sign up again with a new pseudonym. No messing with an admin who sees a brand new profile and declines your request to join their group. Can’t find a group that will let you join? No problem. Just make a new group of your own.

For one thing, animal sales, in their current state, are not OK.

You heard me, animal sales on Facebook are not OK. Not in the state they were in before the ban. Before all this happened, there had been, for years, a desperate need to, at very least, regulate and monitor animal sales on Facebook.

No one in any of the animal communities can deny that the wide open market for all kinds of animals on Facebook has been plagued with unscrupulous buyers and sellers. They are a minority, but they do exist.

Animal sales on Facebook should not be banned, but they should be regulated and monitored. And those regulations cannot be a blanket policy for each of the different animal communities. You can’t develop a policy tailored for cats and dogs and expect it to work for horses, chickens, and cows.

Is there anything they can do?

You bet there is.

• They can start by updating their Community Standards to clarify what is not allowed and what is just collateral damage.
• They can also stop penalizing those who post animals for sale. While ignorance of the rules is no excuse, blindsiding users with a hidden rule is no justification for heavy-handed enforcement.
• They can revamp their algorithms to reduce the number of posts being rejected and users being penalized or banned for animal related items that are not supposed to be disallowed by the new rule, such as supplies, feed, and tack
• They can change some current features that have caused some to unintentionally post an animal for sale using the “sell something” feature. Stop overriding the choice to post as a discussion when a price or sale wording is detected.
• Stop taking advantage of less than savvy users by making the option to add a post to Marketplace a choice they have to proactively make and word it so they do make the choice, they are fully aware that “advertise publicly” means their ad is going into Marketplace.

There is a simple compromise

Give control back to group admins.

Keep the no animal sales allowed rule for Marketplace, but allow group admins to opt out of any posts from their groups to be fed there.

We are a community capable of monitoring our own. We do not need Facebook stepping up and declaring themselves the Puppy Police. And we certainly do not need special interest groups forcing their misinformed opinions on us, which will result in the growth of an underground market for pets that we cannot monitor and nor put a stop to.

Of course, this simple solution isn’t going to happen, because animal sales group admins aren’t the only ones that would rather their group posts don’t feed to Marketplace and Facebook would lose some of its content in the new money making tool they are so proud of.