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> I am loathe to recommend the use of Facebook for anything, but [...] It's at least better than doing nothing

Is it? A central theme of the article is how Facebook is facilitating bike theft by providing essential electronic storefront space, and that you can't get Facebook to take down such storefronts.

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> and that you can't get Facebook to take down such storefronts.

This really surprised me given the difficulty I had with Facebook Marketplace incorrectly taking down my listings and refusing to put them back up (one was an empty aquarium, taken down for selling "live animals").

The remarkable thing about modern online platforms that have zero accountability or customer service is that they somehow manage to have an alarmingly high false positive rate and false negative rate at the same time. It remains unclear to me if this is inevitable at their scale, or simply that they really are that bad.

yes, though as facebook seems to be a lowest-common-denominator method of social media communications for many people, even if they use it rarely, I am not aware of any other 4000 person group for sharing stolen bike information in that specific city.

simultaneously you've got stolen bike sales going on within the facebook marketplace and also a group of people trying to find/recover their stolen bikes.

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