Facebook bans advertising of gun accessories and blocks the creation of events near the White House and the U.S. Capitol until inauguration day

Facebook bans ads for gun accessories and protective equipment in the US from now until at least two days after the inauguration of US President-elect Joe Biden, which will take place on January 20. This emerges from a blog post by the social media giant.

The move is made out of “an abundance of caution,” wrote Facebook.

“We are already banning advertising for weapons, ammunition and weapon improvements such as silencers,” said Saturday’s blog post. “But we will now also ban ads for accessories such as gun safes, vests and gun holsters in the US.”

Facebook also said Friday that it is looking for “signals of violence” or other threats in Washington, DC and across the country.

The announcement comes after the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the building. Several people are now charged.

“In the run-up to Inauguration Day, we took a number of additional measures to prevent further attempts to use our services for violence,” said Facebook.

The company has already stopped all political advertisements. According to the company’s blog posts, additional steps have been added to prevent Facebook from being used to incite violence.

Facebook said the additional measures are:

• Blocking the creation of new Facebook events in close proximity to places like the White House, the US Capitol, and any of the state’s Capitol buildings until inauguration day.
• Restricting some functions to people in the United States due to signals such as repeated violations of our guidelines. These restrictions include locking these accounts out from creating live video or creating an event, group, or page.

Facebook also reviews events listed on the website related to the inauguration and removes any events that violate usage guidelines. Facebook events for events in the United States cannot be created from accounts outside the United States.

Any content that contains the phrase “Stop the Steal” will still be removed from Facebook and Instagram. The original Stop the Steal group was removed in November and the pages continued to be dragged, Facebook said.

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