Last January, Facebook announced its new policy to prohibit “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.”, yesterday June 26 they announced the withdrawal of said prohibition.
As published by Rob Leathern (Director of Product Management), in the official blog of Facebook, the policy that prohibited ads related to cryptocurrencies was updated and states:
“Cryptocurrency Products and Services:
Ads may not promote cryptocurrency and related products and services without our prior written permission.”
Rob, indicates that this prohibition was created while working on the best way to detect misleading advertisements and when the tests performed paid off, the policy would be updated.
After this update that was launched on the same day of June 26, the publication of some articles related to cryptocurrencies will be allowed, as long as they are considered safe.
Ads focused on both binary options and initial coin offers (ICOS) will continue to be rejected by the platform.
Before publishing this type of content you must request an approval to facebook through an application:
“Advertisers are required to submit an application to Facebook before hand if they want to run ads for cryptocurrency products and services, so that Facebook can assess their eligibility, including any licenses they have obtained, whether they are traded on a public stock exchange, and other relevant public background on their business. Under these restrictions, not everyone who wants to advertise will be able to do so. But we’ll listen to feedback, look at how well this policy works and continue to study this technology so that, if necessary, we can revise it over time”, states the social network.
Given how the cryptocurrency market is nowardays, this news could return the confidence to the users, clean the image created around cryptocurrencies and attract new investors.
Now it remains to be seen whether Twitter, Google and the rest of the platforms that have restricted the cryptocurrency publications follow the same path as Facebook and allow these type of ads again.
Once again, it is shown that the prohibitions suffered by cryptocurrencies are the cause of ignorance about the sector, rather than the “danger” of them.
While it is true that protecting users from possible fraudulent advertising is the correct way to act, prohibitions of this type can create a distrust of the product instead of a security for the user, which is not beneficial for any of the parties.
