We’re committed to sustainability and to protecting land in ecological conservation areas. Today, we are announcing measures to curb attempts to sell land in ecological conservation areas within the Amazon rainforest on Facebook Marketplace.
We are updating our commerce policies to explicitly prohibit the buying or selling of land of any type in ecological conservation areas on our commerce products across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
We will now review listings on Facebook Marketplace against an international organization’s authoritative database of protected areas to identify listings that may violate this new policy. Protected areas are crucial for conserving habitats and ecosystems and are critical to tackling the global nature crisis. Based on specific criteria, Facebook will seek to identify and block new listings in such areas. By using complementary information sources like this database, we are adding another barrier for people trying to list these lands on Marketplace. We are announcing this today, and enforcement will now begin to ramp up. Over time, we will observe how this process works and make improvements as appropriate.
Our commerce policies continue to require buyers and sellers to comply with all applicable laws and regulations when using Facebook Inc. commerce surfaces.
These are the first steps Facebook is taking to address this issue, and as with other integrity initiatives we will continue working to prevent people from circumventing our enforcement. The sale of land in conservation areas happens on other platforms and offline as well, but we are committed to keep working with sustainability partners and authorities to address this issue on our apps the best way possible in the long term.