Facebook Bans Crypto-related Ads - What Does This Mean?

The world's biggest social network, Facebook, announced yesterday that it will no longer allow for the advertisement of "financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency".

According to Rob Leathern, Product Management Director at Facebook, the goal of this policy is to prevent scammers from advertising shady ICOs and fishy Forex platforms to Facebook users. However, this might mean Steemit and other Steem-based platforms may have some serious problems turning to Facebook for user recruitment.

As the current social media manager for @utopian-io , this worries me somewhat. As a tech journalist - it fascinates me.

(Image Source: bonafide.news)

The REAL Reason Facebook is Banning Crypto Ads?
We can't know, but we can guess.

The Big Blue likes to show good intentions, but the true agenda of Mark Zuckerberg and his board of directors is usually what hides behind such bold moves. I've already seen some Steemians screaming it's because Facebook is scared of Steemit. With all due respect to Steemit, Facebook is hardly threatened by a platform with a crappy UX and no marketing department or business plan. No offense, Steemit INC.

Facebook thrives on ads, especially in competitive arenas where CPCs can reach sky-high sums. The cryptocurrency and ICO explosion in the past year created quite a bit competition in this field. In addition, no regulator came knocking on Facebook's door, asking to moderate ads for financial products or services.

Why is it that a bank can advertise on Facebook, but a cryptocurrency exchange cannot? And why is Facebook handing Google (and other competitors) such a huge market?

Is a Facebook Coin Coming?
Very possibly so.

With Telegram announcing its plan to launch an ICO, attracting some major VC investors, and Mark Zuckerberg openly writing in his New Year's resolution that he's interested in the potentials cryptocurrencies and decentralization, it's not unlikely that we'll see a Facebook cryptocurrency emerge sooner rather than later. Perhaps even as early as 2018. But there's no way for us to know, even after reading the Zuck's new year resolution regarding the subjects of decentralization and cryptocurrencies.

"With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it. There are important counter-trends to this --like encryption and cryptocurrency -- that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services. This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I'm looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together." - Mark Zuckerberg