This week, Facebook Marketplace came under fire once again for allegedly hosting bad actors who are selling dangerous products to unsuspecting users. Previously, the platform has landed in hot water for hosting the sale of drugs or guns. This time, it’s the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) accusing the social media giant of allowing the sale of banned or recalled goods.

 “CPSC staff has found that such consumer products constitute a serious threat to the health and lives of consumers, including infants and toddlers, and are appearing with regular frequency on Facebook Marketplace,” CPSC Chair Alex Hoehn-Saric wrote in a letter to Facebook founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “While Facebook Marketplace currently has policies to stop controlled substances, counterfeit goods and other illegal products from being listed, they are being widely circumvented or ignored.”

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only online retailer that struggles with this issue. However, the CPSC says that about half of the product removal requests it received in 2020 were for Facebook Marketplace posts. And this year, that figure has skyrocketed to about 75 percent. In other words, Facebook has a lot of work to do to clean up its platform and at least control this problem to a reasonable degree.

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