Spongebob's 'Soul' and Other Weird Stuff Selling on Facebook

Facebook's Marketplace has everything: half-eaten pizza, sad tomatoes, goblin keychains, opened Gatorades. There are even pot and snakes for sale. The joke items – hopefully – were uploaded to Facebook's new consumer-to-consumer marketplace that hopes to rival Craigslist as a place where people peddle their used goods. It was inevitable that some undesirable products would slip through the censors, and Facebook did offer an apology. "As we expanded Marketplace access, we encountered a technical issue that prevented our reviewing system from identifying some posts that violated our Commerce Policies and Community Standards," Mary Ku, director of product management at Facebook said in an e-mailed statement. "As a result, certain posts with content that violated our policies were made visible to people visiting Marketplace. We are working to fix the problem and will be closely monitoring our systems to ensure we are properly identifying and removing violations before giving more people access to Marketplace. We apologize for this issue." The Marketplace works by allowing anyone to post their items for sale, and people can search for them by product category and neighborhood to see what's on offer around them. Facebook users mostly present their true identities on the platform, which theoretically should make the market more trustworthy than rivals with anonymous postings. Whether Facebook is a safer alternative remains to be seen, however. Brands and businesses are not on Facebook Marketplace, which is fortunate, according to one advertising executive. This executive was playing around with the market and saw a pizza with a bite already taken, a picture of a co-worker presumably for sale, and a "soul" represented by Spongebob Squarepants."The Facebook Marketplace icon has only been up and running for 24 hours, and I honestly don't see the value. A bad first impression," the executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Half eaten pizza, a person's soul, people's unsuspecting co-workers?"

Spongebob's 'Soul' and Other Weird Stuff Selling on Facebook

Featured Stories