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I was recently surprised to learn that my wife is still on Facebook. “I’m not,” she replied. “I’m on Facebook Marketplace.”

Facebook Marketplace has emerged as a major planet within the Facebook universe. Its conceit recalls that of Craigslist, a virtual classifieds page that reached its cultural peak during the early aughts. Accessible and affectless, Craigslist rewards the dogged; successful navigators might refresh a page multiple times a minute. I used it long before the age of smartphones, and bruised my poor mouse smacking those blue links.

Craigslist’s bare aesthetic feels as removed as hieroglyphs from our world of For You feeds and AI slop. But toggle over to the more popular Facebook Marketplace, with its thumbnails of wares photographed in gray basements on cloudy days, and see if the word janky—applied, perhaps proudly, to Craigslist—does not fit. I just did this, and found a post hawking a workout set with “$2,500” crossed out. The new price: $50. I believe neither number. Sponsored posts that don’t sell what’s in the description gum up the feed, just like the spam posts that have eroded Craigslist’s usefulness. Replies are clogged with scammers. One post claimed that the seller had “joined Facebook in 2024”; bless this innocent soul.

According to one report, Facebook Marketplace had grown to 1.2 billion monthly active buyers by 2023, eclipsing eBay; an estimated 16 percent of Facebook’s monthly active users access the platform solely to participate in Marketplace. Some of this is a case of being in the right place at the right time. Four years after the launch of Marketplace, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains, and then inflation raised prices. As new products became costlier and less available, used ones became more desirable—and, to those who’d once derided the term pre-owned, more acceptable. Meanwhile, Facebook suggests that Marketplace is gaining popularity with younger users, a demographic that has otherwise drifted away from the platform; perhaps its endless scroll of stuff reminds them of the endless scroll on the app that lured them away.

I take occasional breaks from Facebook. (Hold your applause; they don’t last. And as a full-blown trade war looms, I might be a Facebook Marketplace regular soon enough.) Each time I leave, I notice something different. In the past few months of refraining from thumbing through my feed, I have not missed status updates; most of my friends left the platform long ago, and Facebook’s heavily mediated algorithm shows me little from those still there. Instead, what I’ve noticed is the newfound stability of my bank account. Without Facebook, I spend less money, because what my news feed serves me is, and I cannot stress this enough, ads. I consider myself an über-savvy digital operator, yet Facebook’s fundamental calculation still works on me as intended: The more time I spend on the app, the better it knows me, and the better it knows me, the better it can sell me J.Crew corduroys and Walrus Audio delay pedals.

A feed creaking with ads, an infinite garage sale two tabs over: Facebook’s final form is not digital connector, but digital bazaar. The platform hosts not connections, but transactions. In fact, that seems to be the lesson Facebook has been gesturing at this whole time: Connections are transactions. Facebook introduced the “Like” reaction in 2009, and quickly seized on its potential to collect data on users’ preferences, which it then auctioned to advertisers. That addictive affirmation, which kept us refreshing the page to count the “likes” from our friends, masked a market. Click over to Facebook Marketplace, and the mask comes off entirely.

But as powerful as they are, social-media platforms cannot completely control their users’ behavior. To that end, Facebook has become the primary host for the hyperlocal giveaway clusters known as Buy Nothing groups, which embrace a gift-economy ethos and mutual aid—and, tellingly, prohibit advertising goods and services. My wife, a wizardess at these neighborhood exchanges, reports having made a treasury of friends from Buy Nothing interactions—porch pickups lead to playground playdates and blossom from there—but not from Facebook Marketplace. In other words, the groups least reflective of Facebook’s transactional ethos are the most effective at achieving its purported goal of actually linking people. Perhaps connections are not transactions after all.

Facebook promised to connect people as a means of selling them things; now people are giving things away as a means of connecting. This is far from the company’s original imagining of itself as a societal nexus. And it feels a tad subversive: We should be on our own feed less, and on one another’s porches more.

Related:

• Fact-checking was too good for Facebook.
• The careless people won.

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• The confrontation between Trump and the Supreme Court has arrived.
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• The Signalgate of World War I, by Timothy W. Ryback
• “Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class?”

Today’s News

1. A Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist with lawful permanent residency, can be deported.
2. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to give daily updates about their efforts to secure the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
3. China raised its retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports from 84 percent to 125 percent.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: A new subgenre of literature explores what’s uncovered when you take away someone’s public-facing persona, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Guess What Kind of Cooking Oil Is Tariff-Proof?

By Rachel Sugar

Scientists and seed-oil skeptics can agree on this: olive oil, what an oil! Earlier this year, the fast-salad chain Sweetgreen launched a limited-time-only seed-oil-free menu featuring dressings made with olive and avocado oils, chosen for their flavor but also for “their health benefits and alignment with our values.”

But olive oil may soon cost more—potentially a lot more. Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, which he delayed by 90 days yesterday, are coming for the country’s liquid gold. You know what is mostly insulated from the president’s proposed plan? Seed oils.

Read the full article.

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• Trump is already undermining the next election.
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Culture Break

Watch (or skip). The new Minecraft movie (out now in theaters) may be a box-office smash, but it ignores what makes the video game so special, David Sims writes.

Read. Vauhini Vara’s new memoir, Searches, is a love-hate letter to technology, Matteo Wong writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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