[sradman]

The article falsifies your assumption about Facebook’s strategy and tactics in Bangladesh:

> The wording was intended to circumvent a Facebook algorithm that, to prevent wildlife trafficking, automatically takes down posts with “buy” or “sell” in the description.

[luckylion]

That's because Facebook obviously does not care. They remove the "buy" or "sell" posts due to laws, not because they themselves have issues with wildlife trafficking.

If FB did care, they'd not have a problem shutting it down until you have to go into really obscure code to pass by their systems, at which point it gets useless, because that code isn't known by the other side.

[sradman]

> That's because Facebook obviously does not care.

I seem to lack the ability to see what you find obvious. Perhaps we differ in what counts as supporting evidence or maybe our starting assumptions are drastically different.

[luckylion]

Do you believe that Facebook is capable of adding a similar filter to match "to change hands"? If they were capable, what could the explanation be for why they don't?

[disgruntledphd2]

Because there are many, many langauges and idioms in the world, and AI isn't good enough to do this accurately at the moment.

Given that Bangladesh is pretty poor and small, the likelihood is that if they were to pour resources into it, eventually the business would pull out of the country, as it wouldn't be profitable.

Note that if they block to change hands, then people will start using another idiom, so a mere filter isn't going to accomplish much here.

[mab122]

In Poland people use wording such as "won't sell" or "won't buy" for selling and buying stuff on facebook that cannot be traded there legally.

[hoseja]

Bangladesh may be poor but it certainly isn't small. It's the eighth most populous country!

[disgruntledphd2]

Apologies, I (unconsciously, I guess) weighted by advertising revenue in my head.

I should probably stop doing that.

[luckylion]

It's certainly a cat-and-mouse-game until you've added the obvious idioms, but that only lasts a few iterations, because the users will quickly have to come up with new ones that get less useful as their understanding gets less wide-spread. It's one of those situations where you can absolutely win by and large, even if you don't catch everything. If you catch 95-99%, you're done.

Bangladesh has a population of 160m, and almost all speak Bengali, which is also used in India by a significant minority. It's not like we're talking about ignoring Liechtenstein. It won't eat up the profits by having someone add 10 rules to a filter list for a target audience of 200m+, even if they are poor.