Salvador Rodriguez
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Chesnot | Getty Images
Facebook
on Friday announced it is temporarily banning ads and commerce listings
selling medical face masks as the company continues to grapple with the
reaction of its users to the outbreak of the
COVID-19 coronavirus.
Facebook
Director of Product Management Rob Leathern announced the change in a
Friday tweet. The social media giant will begin to enforce the temporary
ban on these type of ads “over the next few days,” the company said
in a blog post.
“We’re
banning ads and commerce listings selling medical face masks,” said
Leathern, who leads the product team that enforces ad and business
policies across the company’s services. “We’re monitoring COVID19
closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people
trying to exploit this public health emergency. We’ll start rolling out
this change in the days ahead.”
“Supplies are short, prices are
up, and we’re against people exploiting this public health emergency,”
tweeted Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.
The policy change
comes one day after a company spokesman told CNBC that Facebook will
remove political ads posted on its service if they contain
misinformation related to the new coronavirus.
Since the outbreak, Facebook has been impacted in a number of different ways.
The company on Friday
closed its London offices until Monday in response to the outbreak. On Thursday, Facebook
told its Bay Area employees to stay home and cancel any trips. And on Wednesday, the company announced that a contract worker in its Seattle office had
tested positive for the illness.
The
company also canceled its F8 annual software developers conference that
was scheduled for May and it pulled out of a number of other
conferences due to the coronavirus.
Globally, there are now at
least 102,168 cases of the coronavirus and there have been at least
3,491 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
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