In January this year, Facebook banned ads which promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and dodgy cryptocurrency ads. Facebook made the policy intentionally very broad while they figured out how to allow ads that are legitmate while still banning those intended to scam users out of their money.
Now Facebook are relaxing their policies and will review each and every advertiser before their ads are placed on the platform.
“Starting June 26, we’ll be updating our policy to allow ads that promote cryptocurrency and related content from pre-approved advertisers. But we’ll continue to prohibit ads that promote binary options and initial coin offerings.”
Many in the cryptocurrency world have taken this to be fantastic news and evidence of Facebook’s faith in the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In reality no one doubts the success and boom in value of various cryptocurrencies (and the failure to gain widespread public adoption as a payment method so far) so it’s not surprising that Facebook are interested, but what Facebook are really interested in is the ad revenue. Facebook like ads as that’s what pay the bills, they just don’t like bad publicity of which they’ve had plenty recently with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook also added that with the new restrictions, not everyone who wants to advertise will be able to do so. They emphasised the importance of preventing or remove misleading advertising for these products and services. Facebook still appear to think that cryptocurrencies are a pretty dodgy place to play and that’s why they will only allow pre-approved ads and work hard to ensure that they’re safe.
