Licensed firearms retailers can still promote their businesses on Facebook, but they aren’t allowed to accept orders or make sales on the site.
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The Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement to The New York Times Friday that it plans to stop person-to-person gun sales on its networks.
While licensed firearm retailers will still be able to advertise on the site, the updated policy will forbid individual users from coordinating peer-to-peer sales of guns.
The spokesperson said that the company has systems in place to review and remove content that violates the new and previous policies.
Although Facebook doesn’t participate in outright gun sales, it has been a forum for negotiations, and it intends to put an end to that. Among the things being sold privately through Facebook were firearms, something the social network has now explicitly banned.
The new policy applies also to Facebook’s photo-sharing service Instagram.
Those policies already prohibit trade in marijuana, prescription pills and other illicit substances.
The move comes after President Barack Obama earlier this month announced renewed efforts to curb gun violence, including expanded background checks and research into smart guns, which use radio signals or fingerprint scanners to ensure a weapon can be fired only by its owner.
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In February 2014, VentureBeat conducted an investigation that uncovered dozens of pages on Facebook in 2014 where we learned that guns such as semi-automatic weapons, handguns, and silencers were posted for sale on the site. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students.
