After promising to fix its news feed by implementing sweeping changes, Facebook is taking another big step towards cleaning up its act: it’s banning ads promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) because they’re they’re usually BS.
To be clear, Facebook says that these financial products and services are “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices,” and has a few choice examples to explain what sort of ads will disappear from its feed, which you can see below:
The move follows Facebook’s announcements about its decisions to cut back on posts from publishers and Pages you’ve subscribed to, in order to make room for more content shared by people in your social network; the company also said it’s starting to surface more local news to ‘help build community.’
It’s good to see Facebook attempting to reduce the amount of damage crypto scams can do: people around the world have lost millions of dollars to shady businesses that raise money from backers and disappear without a trace, with few options to seek recourse. Many of the ads for these companies are designed to lure investors with the promise of high returns, without adequately warning them of the risks involved.
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It’s not often I say this, but maybe Google and other ad-based businesses should take a leaf out of the social network’s book in this case.
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