Facebook Makes It Easy For Users To Report Suspected Gun Sales

Written by Matt Drange Forbes Staff

In January Facebook announced a ban on the sale of guns and ammunition through the site. But the company has struggled to enforce its policy, which relies entirely on users to flag suspected sales. (Photos via Facebook.)

Facebook users now have the option to do what they couldn’t when the company announced it was banning the sale of guns and ammunition through the site earlier this year: report suspected sales.


The social media giant recently rolled out a new feature that allows users to flag posts that appear to be “describing the purchase or sale of drugs, guns or regulated goods.” The option comes more than three months after Facebook first announced the ban in January, following weeks of complaints from advocates who have taken it upon themselves to police the site by reporting instances of gun sales and groups dedicated to buying and selling guns. Previously, advocates had to report suspected sales as “harassment” or as a “credible threat of violence,” options that aren’t always clear and could make it more difficult for members of Facebook’s content review team to distinguish banned content.

The move figures to boost Facebook’s enforcement of its ban on gun sales, which relies entirely on user reports. Numerous volunteers affiliated with gun violence prevention groups, including Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told FORBES they first noticed the option to report gun sales earlier this month. Some said they received notifications that groups they had reported had been removed, only to later find the groups back up on the site.

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For a while it was fun – like popping shrink wrap bubbles,” said Charlie Galliher, one of the hundreds of advocates for closing the so-called ‘private sale’ loophole who have flooded Facebook with reports of suspected gun sales in recent months. “I regret not confirming they actually were down.”



Facebook spokeswoman Jodi Seth said the company began rolling out the option to users in February, shortly after the new policy went into effect. She declined to say when the feature was made more widely available, adding that the company hasn’t conducted any “formal analysis” on how the change has impacted the volume of posts and groups flagged for Facebook’s content review team. Facebook says it receives roughly 1 million reports of prohibited content each day; it’s unclear what percentage of those involve suspected gun sales.

The move to ban gun sales comes on the heels of intense lobbying in 2015 from the Moms Demand Action group, among other advocacy organizations. The goal is to distance Facebook from its unintended role as facilitator of unregulated, private party party gun sales, something company executives have said privately they want no part of. But enforcement of the policy got off to a rocky start this year.


It didn’t help matters that one of Facebook’s own employees, a senior director of engineering named Chuck Rossi, was helping to bring banned groups back online. About a week after the policy went into effect, Rossi instructed gun page administrators around the country to create a secret ‘Admin Contact’ page where they could gather to vent their frustrations and try and get their groups into compliance. With Rossi’s help, many of the groups were quickly reinstated. Some, FORBES found, then went on to continue serving as online classified sections for guns.

Arron Miller, one of the page’s administrators who worked closely with Rossi to have groups reinstated, posted a detailed description of the challenges facing gun enthusiast pages on Facebook, with answers to frequently asked questions and instructions for groups that had been shut down. It worked, with Miller estimating that “about 80 percent” of the initial groups were brought back online. Now, some of the same groups are being reported again, starting the whole process all over.

Gun sales, meanwhile, continue unabated in many cases today. Take the Sacramento Gun Enthusiasts group, for example, a closed group for gun owners looking to buy and sell guns and ammunition. Like thousands of others around the country, the group is designed to facilitate face-to-face transactions. Take this post from May 17, for example, listing a Glock 17 semi-automatic handgun for sale.

The ad, like others posted daily to the more than 800 members of the page, was met with questions from potential buyers. The goal for sellers is to attract as many buyers as possible and then quickly take the conversation private, often via Facebook’s own private messenger app, which allows users to exchange payment directly to one another.

A byproduct of Facebook’s ban on gun sales is that posts that were once public are now invisible to most users. Many groups that were reinstated after being shut down have gone from “closed,” where outsiders can still search for the group and view limited details about it, to “secret,” an unlisted setting which makes it difficult for anyone not already a member to find the group, let alone view its content. It’s unclear how Facebook’s user-dependent enforcement can combat these cases.

Source:Forbes Tech