Several legal Facebook pages selling marijuana were deleted by the social media platform. It seems the company considered that the pages were violating their terms of use and thus decided to take the drastic measure of banning them.

The actions of Facebook angered both dispensary owners and patients. Several such pages that were banned were the ones of marijuana dispensaries for medical purposes located in New Jersey, Washington or Maine.

The major corporation has yet to comment on their actions, and the only explanation left for owners and patients is the message that appears when trying to access a marijuana dispensary page, which refers to the fact that the page does not comply with the terms and standards of the community on Facebook. One owner of such a page believes that Facebook has done a great disservice to clients who were all expecting updates.

According to the law, medical marijuana dispensaries can set up Facebook pages only if they promote services and not products. The administrators of the banned pages have all claimed that they were using the social media platform to guide potential customers.

At the moment, only legal marijuana dispensaries from certain states are allowed to cultivate or sell the cannabis plant. Even though they do function legally, Facebook has erased all the information on these pages, careless about the accounts’ individuality.

While it is not clear how many such pages have been taken down, we arrive once more at the hypocrisy of social media. Facebook along with other such platforms do what they think is best for their profit. This is the reason why you can still see indecent photos on the website, even though these certainly do not follow their terms or community standards. The same goes for any type of controversial content that will draw more views, more likes and more users.

Content that is not so useful for major companies will get thrown away, like in the case of the medical marijuana dispensers. Unfortunately, it will be quite some time before we will be able to trust the media. If before we were blaming mass media controlled by governments and praising the new online media for showing the truth, this new medium has also been corrupted by third parties.

The fact that Facebook pages selling marijuana were deleted stands as proof of the company’s preferential system of monitoring the content its users post.

Image Source: ProjectKnow