ZOMG! Facebook is going to ban gun pages! ZOMG!

If you follow any gun related pages on Facebook, you’ve probably seen this link making the rounds today. It’s a puff piece, written to get people worked up and it seems like it’s working.

A couple things:

Facebook may announce company policy changes for gun-related pages in the coming weeks

• They MAY make an announcement about changes, and I MAY find a breifcase filled with 10lbs of $20 bills today.

The social network has been under pressure from the powerful Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the Moms Demand Action civic group to ban gun-themed fan pages on the site.

• Neither of these groups are powerful.

Here’s the deal, it’s already against Facebook’s TOS to advertise guns for sale on the site:

Weapons:

• Ads and Sponsored Stories may not promote firearms, ammunition, paintball guns, bb guns, fireworks, explosives, pepper spray, knives, tasers, or weapons of any kind, including those used for self-defense. Ads and Sponsored Stories may not directly or indirectly link to landing pages where people can purchase any of these products.
• Images of weapons are generally acceptable, as long as the weapon is not pointed directly at the person seeing it.
• Ads and Sponsored Stories promoting blogs or groups that exist to help connect people whose interests are related to these products are allowed as long as the service does not lead to the sale of any weapons or explosives.
• Acceptable: “Gun Exposition Today”
• Unacceptable: “Get your ammo here”

I think it’ll all come down to money. Firearm related pages on Facebook spend money on advertising, so I don’t see them making any changes to their TOS. If they do, it’s honestly not that big of deal anymore. For some time now Facebook has been changing they way that people see posts by pages that they like, and on any given post, only 100 or so of the 900+ people who like the Triangle Tactical Facebook page will actually see what we post.

The surefire way to get all of our content is to subscribe in an rss reader (I use an app called Feedly, and it’s for Android and iOS devices) or to subscribe to the email newsletter.

We’ll see what the future brings, but I’m pretty confident that nothing will change.