In today’s world of social media where information spreads at lightning fast speed, social networking giant ‘Facebook’ has been recently found flexing its muscles against its one of the biggest fights of controlling the spread of fake news.
Moreover, with the recent craze surrounding cryptocurrencies, Facebook, which is one of the most largely used social networking platforms, is being frequently used to spread information and news about digital currencies. Having received a lot of persisting complaints about fraudulent and spammy cryptocurrency ads on its platform, Facebook has now issued an outright ban on them.
As per the new policy released by the social media giant, and ads promoting or involving cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings will be brought down. The new ruling issued today on Jan 30, Rob Leathern, the company’s product management director, writes: “ads must not promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings, or cryptocurrency”.
Leathern further continued to write: “We want 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.”
In addition to the Facebook platform, the enforcement of the new ruling will be made on popular photo-sharing app Instagram (owned by Facebook) and also on the company’s off-platform Audience Network. In the recent growing interest in cryptocurrency investment among global investors, the social media website has witnessed heavy flooding of ads pitching investment advice for cryptocurrency and also for Initial Coin Offerings.
Some of the popular ads found frequently on Facebook appeared with the titles like “Click here to learn more about our no-risk cryptocurrency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world”, “Use your retirement funds to buy Bitcoin”, and “New ICO! Buy tokens at a 15% discount now!”
Other advertisements have also been seen luring the Facebook users by promising sky-high returns on their investments. Leathern said that Facebook is targeting such ads as a part of its evolving policy to protect its users from being a victim of any fraudulent activities, through their medium.
Leathern hinted that as the requirement arises, the company can possibly change the policy in the future. He wrote: “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.”
This decision supposedly comes in the wake that Facebook being the largest used social media platform has to always remain cautious and act in the larger merit of its users, thereby protecting their interests over the longer period of time.
