It’s a story in three steps:
1. The problem is that there is a staggering amount of “things” that can be either sold on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp or advertised for (it’s the same service): every film on Netflix, every item for sale on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, every game on a random retro console platform, etc. There are hundreds of billions of things. Some are duplicates (humanity barely makes that many things), but not many are on the same platform anyway. The real problem is that there are even more updates: trillions. When I was there, most large partners updated all their items daily because the API didn’t let them match items dynamically easily enough, and they believed updates granted them some magical recommendation properties. All those updates have to go through a staggering amount of processes, one by one: unauthorized items, spam filters, enlarging photos, transformers to figure out what it is so it can be advertised to the right audience, etc. Why not just item creation? Because it’s all too easy to upload a valid description and then update it to sell unicorn meat. There are miracles done to figure out which items are new and which are neutral changes (like price or inventory updates) or no changes at all. Still, those aren’t nearly as effective as offering the right tools to the bigger partners (like helping them figure out which items were actually updated on their side, before sending them through an expensive, convoluted pipeline on our end). That was my recommendation, which got lost in internal politics. But at the moment, whatever “trivial“ process you recommend, you genuinely have to add 12 zeros to its computational cost.
2. Assuming you resolve internal politics, prioritize sending new products (and genuine product updates) separately from inventory, and only receive billions of materially new descriptions every day, the company has the skill and resources to run proper filters and separate a course on Python with an illegal snake trade — but why? More than any other company, Meta demands a business case for everything, and being nice to 0.000_001% of their partners isn’t a good case. Again, I’m not exaggerating: the entire economy of several large countries goes through WhatsApp. Groceries, Restaurant supplies, Job offers, Prescription drugs, Taxi services, Spare garage parts, Police uniforms, Wedding planning, Army weapon procurement contracts, there is everything going through there. Reuven is a great teacher, but his classes are a speck in that world. “All digital goods not sold by the top 15 platforms” is a tiny sliver of a slice of that pie. So you have to figure out how many second-hand VHS resellers got kicked out for offering a lightly used copy of _The Hounds of Baskerville_ but also how many bakers making custom cakes have heard of someone getting kicked and didn’t even try advertising… With barely any trace on Meta for many of those and several orders of magnitude more actual spammers and people creating accounts by the dozen genuinely trying to sell endangered species. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” gets weirdly negative when you have all the juice in the world already.
3. On top of that, your business case has to be worth the time for several of the best teams (read: expensive) at Meta: computer vision, spam detection, parsing the largest database Meta has, etc. More importantly, their filter has to offer an absolute guarantee that not a single pangolin can be advertised or sold on any of the services: the company breathes by the strongly held belief that any compromising screenshot will end up on the front page of the NYTimes for a month (because it absolutely will). Some YouTuber selling powdered sugar as “coke” as a prank for views? He has to be banned before he can fake a screenshot. Any less, and the PR team will have headaches.
Bonus: Among the things that Meta has learned they can’t rely on through similar crises is Unicode. There’s a big scandal that (among other failures in management) hinged on a bag-things-detector failing because one language has an alphabet that wasn’t compatible with Unicode, so the bag-things-detector failed silently. Can you build a system able to detect euphemisms similar to ‘oregano :wink: :wink:’ in Hokkien, or Gondi? That shouldn’t prevent Meta from having a system that recognizes English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Mandarin, etc., and works for 95% of the items, but you can never know if you might be missing something.
A heavy-handed system, full or blatant false positive scales better, doesn’t cost that much, and is cheaper to operate, with less risk of freak actual positive.