Facebook is cracking down on clothing ads that consumers say are scams
BuzzFeed had recently reported that many consumers were furious that ads they were seeing on Facebook were not selling the dresses they showed. The ads enticed consumers with attractively low prices.
But consumers said they received shockingly horrific knockoffs - not what the ads conveyed in their images at all.
This is apparently not acceptable by Facebook's standards.
"One of our most important goals with Facebook ads is to present experiences that are relevant and high-quality," Facebook's vice president of Ads and Pages, Andrew Bosworth wrote to BuzzFeed News. "We understand the gravity of this issue and we're taking it very seriously."
"We're looking at ways to incorporate new signals that will help us identify which of the over 50 million active businesses on our platform are delivering products and services that are overwhelmingly unsatisfactory to people," BuzzFeed says Bosworth wrote. "As you [BuzzFeed] pointed out in the piece - the challenge isn't just with ads or posts on Facebook, but also the experiences people have with businesses off of Facebook. It's a complex problem, but we are working on it and will do everything we can to make sure people trust and enjoy the content they see on Facebook."
There was a bevy of sites guilty of posting these ads, BuzzFeed had initially reported, including Zaful, Rosegal, SammyDress, RoseWe, TideBuy, Choies, and DressLily.
BuzzFeed had reported that several of these companies operated under a Chinese e-commerce company called ShenZhen Global Egrow E-Commerce Co., which made about $200 million in sales in 2014.
Additionally, the photos in the ads showing off attractive apparel had often been stolen from a variety of sources, BuzzFeed had reported.
People had taken to Facebook in a variety of communities, such as Knockoff Nightmares and DressLily Victims - Ban DressLily, to post comparison photos of what they saw online in ads and what they actually got when the ordered the dresses.