Facebook Lifts Ban on Cryptocurrency Ads

Facebook is lifting its ban on cryptocurrency ads and will now allow few advertisers to promote crypto businesses and services, like exchanges. The companies will now need to show evidences that they have licences. In short, interested advertisers will now have to fill out an application that includes their details and submit their licences.

The social network giant will still block ads that promote initial coin offerings. Back in January, Facebook had banned  cryptocurrency-related advertising on its platform. This move was soon followed by Google.

Facebook product management director Rob Leathern said in a Tuesday blog post that

“In the last few months, we’ve looked at the best way to refine this policy — to allow some ads while also working to ensure that they’re safe. So 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”

In January, when facebook announced that it will ban cryptocurrency ads promoting cryptocurrency products and services there was a huge decline in the cryptocurrency markets as the total market capitalization of all cryptos shed over 15% of its value in 24 hours to hit a low of $485 million.

Rob Leathern further said that

“It’s important that we continue to help prevent or remove misleading advertising for these products and services. So please continue to report content that violates our Advertising Policies by selecting “report ad” in the upper right-hand corner of any advertisement.

Facebook’s policy is large and it is still trying to detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices. The company will revisit this policy and how it enforces it as its signals improve. Facebook had banned cryptocurrency ads because the ads were a problem for users because they are “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.