Facebook will block advertisements and commercials for hand sanitizers, disinfectant wipes and coronavirus test kits. This is done to prevent irresponsible parties who want to exploit the situation.
Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern immediately announced this policy through his personal Twitter account. Through blogs, Facebook also said it would delete posts on Facebook or Instagram that contained the products.
“This is another step to help protect against inflated prices and predatory behaviour we’re seeing,” Leathern wrote on Twitter.
In addition to masks, we're now also banning hand sanitizer, surface disinfecting wipes and COVID-19 test kits in ads and commerce listings. This is another step to help protect against inflated prices and predatory behavior we’re seeing (1/2)
— Rob Leathern 🎲 (@robleathern) March 19, 2020
“We’ll be ramping up our automated enforcement for ads and commerce next week. If we see abuse around these products in organic posts, we’ll remove those, too.” he continued.
This new policy was implemented after some time ago Facebook temporarily banned health mask advertisements. But some mask advertisements are still seen on the social media platform this week.
Facebook is not the only technology platform that is busy handling advertisements around health equipment amid a coronavirus outbreak. Earlier this month, Google said it would stop showing health mask advertisements on its platform.
However, CNBC reports that Google and several other technology advertising companies are still serving the advertisement until this week. Even so, Google said they had succeeded in removing millions of ads that wanted to profit from the coronavirus.
