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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook said it was "ready to work with local authorities", but indicated it would not take independent action of its own to halt the trade.

Huh? If the ads were for firearms or child slaves, would Facebook's response also be that it was ready to work with local authorities, but would not take independent action?

So how can Facebook take this kind of flippant approach to this, but not on other items? The, not even hypocrisy, but just complete lack of fundamental human decency and respect is revolting.

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Selling children and guns (at least in most parts of the world) is just outright prohibited. Selling land isn't.

You don't need to figure out whether it is an illegal or legal child sale as all child selling is illegal. Selling land in itself is not illegal.

Its outright prohibited to sell illegal land as well. Facebook might also require a proof of ownership before allowing the sale.

How do you verify proof of ownership? I have a “patta” indicating I own some land. There are only a few million people in the world who can even read the words on this document. There are only a few thousand who can understand the meaning behind those words. There are many a hundred who can verify if it’s a forgery or not. Meanwhile I doubt you can tell which part of the world it’s from based on just “patta” or looking at the document.

It’s strange that multiple people on this thread have gone with “prostitution, slavery, sales of firearms don’t happen on online marketplaces, why should this?” It’s so obvious - those are obviously illegal. Any reasonable human being taking a look at a gun sale post can tell that 1. It’s a gun and 2. Guns shouldn’t be sold here. It’s so obvious that it can be trivially automated too.

Please respond if you can verify pattas in a reasonable amount of time. Because boy do I have a business idea for you.

I see I'm in the wrong on the obviousness of the ownership of the land. I wish I had a good way to verify such things. But I don't and I am getting that no one really has. So, because it's so hard to verify, does that than mean that it's ok to sell? Given that Brazil doesn't have a clear way of proving ownership, and people are abusing this situation and, and Facebook is making a profit of this abuse, while it's clear they're incapable of validating their statements, than I think it's reasonable to shut this service down for plots of lands in Brazil. Until either Facebook steps up their game of validating, or Brazil has a better way of proving ownership so this abuse doesn't happen. But profiting and facilitating while dodging all the blame is too easy in my opinion.

They don't have a way of verifying ownership of any other item on the marketplace either. That tablet I have for sale - did I steal it? Maybe. A thief can easily supply a forged receipt. An honest person who bought if for real might have lost their receipt. It's an intractable problem. It's not possible to verify ownership of every item there is. Should online marketplaces simply shut down then? If they are, people will get around it by making buying-selling groups. It is difficult to police behaviour that is, strictly speaking, legal.

If your suggestion was to shut down land sales in Brazil in particular because of the evident failures of the Brazilian government, yeah seems reasonable. Not like it will stop these criminals, but it's a worthwhile step to take.

You mentioned profit a couple of times. How much profit do you think the marketplace made in this case? My understanding is that listings are free.

No, I don't think all market places should shut down. This seems like an isolated problem: brazil land for sale is disputed. So, indeed I'm arguing that facebook should upend their services for this specific items untill it's been resolved.

Regarsing the profit. I can't give a specific number. But nothing is free on Facebook or Google. You pay with your data and they provide you a service in return. Facebook creates value from this data and thus creates a profit. It's rather straightforward and not something I should have to explain on HN

It’s not an isolated problem to Brazilian land. Practically every item on any marketplace has some possibility of being stolen, or in the case of luxury/fashion goods, counterfeit.

What is "outright prohibited" depends entirely on jurisdiction (except maybe humans, pretty sure selling humans is banned everywhere). Person-to-person firearm sales aren't allowed on Facebook Marketplace[0] even though they are legal in much of the United States. I'm not sure why this is, but a few options come to mind... 1) it's hard to ensure that it's done legally, so Facebook doesn't even try; 2) they (the people who set policy) have some moral compunction that tells them not to; 3) firearm sales are had PR.

Their lack of action here doesn't tell me that they're in the right. It tells me that they 1) don't think this is a big enough problem to jeopardize revenue by restricting or increasing moderation for real estate listings and/or 2) they don't think they'll be held accountable, by the law or by consumers.

https://m.facebook.com/help/179037502478035?helpref=uf_perma...

> Selling children and guns (at least in most parts of the world) is just outright prohibited. Selling land isn't.

Do you have a reference for this? Especially guns?

Children and guns can be trafficked.

They only block Trump ... everything else takes legal actions...

Violating TOS gets you removed from a platform. Is that controversial? I assume HN can do the same.

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