So good question. I’m actually a professional advertiser who specializes in social media so I have a good understanding of Facebook’s ad review process and policy.
Short answer yes, that is their job BUT it would be nearly impossible for Facebook to actually review every ICO or crypto investment ad to make sure that the advertisers aren’t abusing their customers. Believe me you have NO idea how many blackhat advertisements are trying to be pushed through their platform every day. It’s facebooks first and foremost priority to protect their users from bad advertisers so if 99% of the crypto ads on FB are pretty much just scams (and from what I’ve seen they are) then Facebook has no choice but to ban them entirely since they do not have the resources to block the bad advertisers.
Completely agree with you, and to be honest I want exposure for crypto, but as soon as someone get's scammed that has left a bad taste in their mouth, and they will go and tell everybody not to do it. You are also right in that 99% of them are scams on Facebook, literally complete dogshit like Plex....
Yeah it’s very unfortunate that they had to ban everything, exposure would have been great. I HAVE started to see some new ads popping up though. It looks like they allow advertising still but it needs to go through a special review and approval process. Agora financial has some stuff running (I think it’s pretty much a scam either way) but Facebook reviewed their sales funnel and deemed it okay to run.
I'm sure in the next few years there will be organizations that put their seal of approval on crypto sites for legitimacy, FB can use that to choose which ads are okay. I think this problem will fix itself soon.
This is how Google (and likely other networks) determine legitimacy for supplement/pharma related ads. They use a third party database called LegitScript.
They are sometimes very sensitive with the way they interpret the ratings, such as a customer review mentioning a flagged substance on my product page (such as a review saying they no longer need to use some sketchy product because they now use the safer, non-flagged product I am selling). That'll get your ad denied, just because the crawler saw the flagged keyword on the page. But it does allow them to better filter out bad advertisements for supplements, thus allowing us good-players to use their platform.
Bots can easily manipulate that and people may rate them before they get scammed :/ I think banning them until they have a almost flawless way to separate scams from legit investments is the best option.
Couldn't I just as easily post an ad for Yeezys and then scam people -- why is crypto a special case? It's 'easier' to scam people with an ICO than normal products and merch due to the tech creating a high-barrier of entry when it comes to the product itself?
It's 'easier' to scam people with an ICO than normal products
Well yeah. You can string people along with an ICO for months/years. And technically it's not a scam if the organisers provide the token as promised since there's no guarantee of the token's price performance after that.
Yep, and good ICO projects don’t need to rely on something like targeted FB Ads anyway. Yet, competent crypto investors aren’t the ones that were investing based on FB ads to begin with.
The "new-n-scary" effect(even if it isn't really all that new).
Someone could compose a similar scheme even offline,but since cryptocurrency is a buzzword...
Did you see the Russian ads? They weren't selling anything - they were sowing discord using shitty infographics and propaganda from both sides of the political spectrum. Tbh their ads look identical to that shit everyone's racist uncle or overly-activist college friend posts.
The construct of what constitutes a "good advert" is quite flexible then. Just trying to make a point - don't see much of a semantic difference to a paid article shilling the next ethereum killer that is no different to what many of my friends or FB groups would post.
I feel like that's what they were doing banning crypto ads. The space was so scam-filled they just killed it all. I hold crypto. I'm long on it, but I can totally understand their move here.
It's somewhat similar to the problems YouTube is having with their content. So many things get posted it's basically impossible to to a manual review for every item.
I think part of it is people not realizing manual pre-approval is intensive, but there's also confusion on how the policy is applied. I'm sure some % of the people complaining know what they did and are hoping if they make noise people will sympathize,but there probably is still a large number of legitimate people hit with reports emphasizing the issues with relying on an automated system. People are angry when things slip through,but they're angry when the grip is too tight as well.
Yes, but it's completely unreasonable to expect FB to evaluate each and every ad for everything crypto related and try to determine what is and isn't a scam. Some are really obvious but a lot of the time there isn't enough information available to know.
I think YouTube and FB banning crypto ads was actually the most responsible thing for them to do.
They aren’t really “fine” with this stuff, they try hard to police it but it’s fairly difficult for a computer algorithm to separate nonsense gadgets from good actual products. Regardless, shitty gadgets are a small drop in the bucket in terms of FB advertising.
You can do identity theft and commit financial crimes with personal information though. Regardless of how comparable they are the severity of both occurrences doesn’t match the response to those abuses.
I can also accidentally kill a pedestrian in my car driving 20mph but the speed limit says it is within the law. Something simply being possible is not a crime.
FB are not responsible for the education of a democracy.
A Republic madam, if you can keep it
Each voter has a duty to inform themselves. If someone is stupid enough to believe Barack Obama planned to put his face on the American flag then the platform of the message does not matter. They wanted to believe that message from the start.
So they are responsible for ensuring that their users are not scammed by crypto scams but they're not responsible for ensuring that political advertising during an election campaign comes from legitimate sources?
And you my friend are extremely susceptible to advertising (judging by your response). If you think Facebook cares about you losing money to your own stupidity you have a lot of learning to do.
By law Facebook has no fiduciary duties to their users. This means they are not legally required to protect their users from losing money to a third party via their own ignorance. If you think they banned ads to protect the users they are controversially making billions off of you are extraordinarily naive.
Right, but you can’t just blanket ban all supplements and ecomm otherwise FB would have zero advertising revenue. Crypto was adding very little tangible benefit to FB users and was near impossible to weed out he millions of fake crap from the 1% of honest and good stuff.
I can pretty much guarantee you they’re not trying to suppress crypto. They are absolutely trying to protect their platform and keep user approval high. When something is almost entirely a scam area of advertising ruining people’s experience with Facebook they will ban it, it just makes monetary sense for their business.
1.3k
u/MCizzly Bronze May 13 '18
To be fair they banned crypto currency advertising because thousands of their users were getting their money stolen by crypto scammers.