Tuesday, Jun. 16, 2020
Does Facebook ban political ads if they appear to promote the use of guns?
Facebook's published advertising policies, while permitting many kinds of political advertising, do state that it will reject any kind of ad that promotes "the sale or use of weapons, ammunition, or explosives. This includes ads for weapon modification accessories." Ads cannot show "weapons of any kind, including pepper spray, non-culinary knives/blades/spears, tasers, nun-chucks, batons, or weapons intended for self-defense."
The policy received renewed media attention when the social-media platform rejected an ad featuring Georgia Congressional candidate Marjorie Green holding a semi-automatic weapon.
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
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