In January, Facebook became the first social media company to ban ads for cryptocurrencies and ICOs.
The company created a new policy “that prohibits ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency.”
Facebook lists the follow four examples of ads that will no longer be allowed:
Shortly after, every other social media company or ad-carrying entity signaled their virtue by following Facebook’s lead. However, at the time we questioned why… wondering aloud if Zuckerberg had in mind his own Facebook-coin…
Zuckerberg also announced that he’s “looking into cryptocurrency” in his January 5th announcement on Facebook…
“Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force. But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. 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.“
Earlier in the week, Facebook announced a major shakeup in management, creating a new area of responsibility focused on blockchain. As CoinTelegraph reported, David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s messaging app Messenger, announced that the social media site is exploring possible applications for blockchain technology, CNBC reported May 8.
“I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch,” Marcus shared in a post Tuesday afternoon on his personal page.
Marcus has been leading Messenger for almost four years. In December, he joinedcryptocurrency exchange Coinbase as a board member. Facebook, however, hasn’t revealed how interested it is in applying blockchain.
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
Which brings us to today, and a report from Alex Heath at Cheddar that Facebook is exploring the creation of its own cryptocurrency, a virtual token that would allow its billions of users around the world to make electronic payments, people familiar with Facebook’s plans told Cheddar.
“They are very serious about it,” said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced plans.
Facebook started studying blockchain almost a year ago, when a member of its corporate development team, Morgan Beller, began looking at how the social platform could use the emerging technology.
During an interview at a conference in February, Marcus said Facebook didn’t have plans to integrate cryptocurrency into its apps anytime soon.
“Payments using crypto right now is just very expensive, super slow, so the various communities running the different blockchains and the different assets need to fix all the issues, and then when we get there someday, maybe we’ll do something,” Marcus said.
All of which would explain why Zuckerberg wanted the rest of the cryptocurrencies off his site. It’s perhaps going to be a little tricky to explain why his cryptocurrency is not the terrible financial weapon of mass deception that led to the ad ban.
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