Report: Gun Ads Still Common On Facebook Despite Ban On Promoting Weapons

Facebook has stringent rules dictating the kinds of ads that can be run on its platform. However, whether it enforces those rules correctly is another matter entirely. For instance, researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) published a report this week showing massive holes in Facebook’s content moderation efforts allowing ads that promote firearms.

In its policies, Facebook parent company Meta explicitly bans the sale of weapons on its platforms. However, TTP researchers were able to still find many examples of these ads with minimal effort.

“These ads are appearing to slip through the cracks pretty easily, and it raises a lot of questions about what their approvals actually look like,” TTP director Katie Paul told NBC News. “Is their machine learning as good as they say, or are they pulling the veil over the eyes of the public and Congress again?”

For its part, Facebook insisted that the report “uses a tiny sample size of 173 ads out of millions of ads that run across our apps.” The company went on to say that “the vast majority of people using our apps never actually see ads that violate our policies against weapons or firearms.” But still, this problem occurs often enough that it’s clear Facebook still has work to do to find and remove this content.




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