Facebook announced in a blog post this week that cryptocurrency ads would officially be banned from the platform.
Facebook announced in a blog post on Tuesday that they would be banning all advertisements pertaining to Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and cryptocurrencies. The post says that the decision was made as a result of “deceptive” practices by cryptocurrency projects.
We’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.
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.
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.
Users on social media posted a range of reactions to the news. Some condemned the news, citing an early January post in which Mark Zuckerberg claimed that he wanted to learn more about cryptocurrencies.
“There are important counter-trends to this — encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”
Another tweet pointed out that Facebook users had already been scammed by fake ICO offerings.
Another user claimed that Facebook’s announcement would lead to more unjustified doubt about the cryptocurrency space.