User pages with photos and drawings of marijuana leaves are all over Facebook, but one place you will no longer find such images is in advertisements on the nation's largest social network site.
Just Say Now reports the nationwide pot-legalization campaign was informed last
week that its leafy image on a proposed ad was not acceptable under Facebook's “smoking products” policy.
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However, no such policy is included in Facebook advertising guidelines. And the social network has not responded to requests for that policy from several media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times.
Just Say Now's ad, which is part of a national campaign calling for legalization, was yanked after running on Facebook for two weeks.
“We're not allowed to show the image of the candidate that we are
advancing,” Michael Whitney, with the progressive Firedoglake.com blog that is part of Just Say Now, reportedly tells the Times. “That's why we're calling out
Facebook for this really backwards decision.”
“We'd like to reiterate that Just Say Now can promote their campaign
and petition through Facebook ads as long as they use another image,” Annie Ta, a spokeswoman for the website, counters to the LA daily.
Just Say Now ads featuring a photo of President Barack Obama in place of the pot leafs are not receiving the same response, according to Whitney.
Meanwhile, Google says it has no such prohibition on ads featuring marijuana leaves, so long as they abide by the search engine's guidelines.
Righteous buyers now know who to do business with.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.