With a view to enhance the integrity and security of its ads, Facebook is imposing ban on all cryptocurrency ad, including ICOs, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Social media giant Facebook has announced its new policy according to which all ads that promote cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin should be banned.
Company’s Product Management Director Rob Leathern explained this move in his blog post saying that they’ve “created a new policy that prohibits ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency.”
He also added that “misleading or deceptive ads have no place on Facebook” as the team has been always trying to do the ads on their social media as safe and trustworthy for users as possible. It means that no advertisers even those who perform absolutely legal and legitimate activity will now have a possibility to promote their products and services related to cryptocurrencies on Facebook.
Among the examples of unfit ads there are phrases like “Use your retirement funds to buy Bitcoin!” and “Click here to learn more about our no-risk cryptocurrency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world”.
Rob Leathern also wrote that the company wants “people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception. That said, there are many companies who are advertising binary options, ICOs and cryptocurrencies that are not currently operating in good faith”.
Realizing that it is impossible to catch every ad and delete it following the new rules, Facebook asks its community to report any violations of the company’s advertising policies. People can inform the Facebook’s team about any inappropriate ad on the social media by clicking on the upper right-hand corner of the ad.
But Facebook is not the only place affected by changes. According to Rob Leathern, “this policy is intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices, and enforcement will begin to ramp up across our platforms including Facebook, Audience Network and Instagram”.
“We will revisit this policy and how we enforce it as our signals improve”, he added.
Nevertheless, not all the representatives of the management board of Facebook took the same view on the new policy. Some of them believe that the initiative unfairly imposes restrictions for legitimate cryptocurrency companies and related crypto products.
Let us also recall that less than a month ago company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that one of the most important tasks for him in 2018 would be studying cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology with an aim to find out how it could help improve the work of Facebook.
next