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by tnt128 1967 days ago
First of all, fb ad policy explicitly doesn’t allow selling fire arms.

https://m.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/weapo...

If you are selling related stuff(belts, holster, vest, gun case etc), be prepared to have your fb ad account banned often(as the algo will likely (mis)-categorize you into selling weapons).

Advertisers in this space generally are very good at 1) cloaking, 2) renting or purchasing ad accounts.

both are against fb policy.

But in the end, as long as there is a positive ROI, and there is a way to circumventing the system, people will continue to do that. I don’t see how that’s fbs fault.

1 comments

Maybe they could address the whole "there is a way to circumventing the system" thing? I mean, they own the system, so they should probably be responsible for any circumvention.
Pretty sure its unskilled low paid labor humans clicking yes or no for fb ads. You would not believe what things i managed to get trough. My account was only later deleted because i was advertising self made cotton masks. Which for some reason raised red flag suddenly
It's a much harder problem then it appears. Similarly to security, it's a cat and mouse game with the people who are trying to game the system, and developing solutions to catch them without too many false positives.
They're not circumventing the system, they're circumventing the false positives of the gun-detection algorithm. As the parent pointed out, advertising these gun-related things is explicitly allowed by Facebook.
The end justifies the means?
I guess so. It's not as if there's anything morally wrong with playing the game of hide-and-seek that Facebook created. No laws are being broken and nobody's being harmed.