The White House has urged Silicon Valley to bake encryption backdoors into its wares, and has also urged social media companies to make it hard for unlicensed gun dealers to sell firearms on their networks.
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The social-networking site Facebook, and its Instagram photo-sharing service, are prohibiting person-to-person firearms transactions and related firearms advertising on the popular platforms.
Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of product policy, said in a statement that “Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another”.
A complete break down of the new rules can be read on Facebook’s Community Standards page, under the “Regulated Goods” category.
It updates Facebook’s regulated goods policy, introduced in March 2014, that banned people from selling marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs.
In another incident, a convicted felon in Iowa was apprehended after he allegedly bought guns illegally through a connection he made on Facebook with an undercover police officer running a sting operation. There were some restrictions on the sales in 2014, but the site didn’t ban private sales.
The move isn’t really much of a surprise-these changes to Facebook’s policies come roughly a month after President Barack Obama’s executive actions on guns were announced, which create stricter provisions for private, even individual, gun sales. Representatives of two gun-owner rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The latest policy drew praise Friday from Everytown for Gun Safety, a group formed by the merger of Watts’s organization with another group started by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and from a leader of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
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Those efforts, said “Moms” founder Shannon Watts, led to “new policies to curb children’s exposure to guns and to clarify state laws around selling and buying guns online”. “That’s why it’s crucial that other sites and online networks follow Facebook’s example and listen to the American people and take action to save lives”.
