All Pot, No Leaf

FB don't like this ad. It's that damn leaf. It promotes smoking, and smoking is baaaad.

For the record, Facebook doesn't have a problem with pot, or with legalization efforts, but they really don't like anything to do with the pot leaf.

The issue came up after the Just Say Now campaign – a project of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and Firedoglake.com – learned that their ad featuring an illustration of a pot leaf, which had already run more than 38 million times on the social networking site, was being censored by the man. "Facebook is banning political speech," the Just Say Now folks wrote in a statement on their web site. "This is unfair, and unacceptable."

According to the Los Angeles Times, Facebook now deems the use of a pot leaf in advertisements to be "illegal content." Apparently that was the second explanation they'd given; last week, the JSN campaign was reportedly told that the ad would be banned because it violated Facebook's policy on "smoking products." Either way, Facebook spokeswoman Annie Ta told the Times that the JSN ad is still welcome on FB: "We'd like to reiterate that Just Say Now can promote their campaign and petition through Facebook Ads as long as they use another image," she said.

(Interestingly, one of Facebook's founders, Dustin Moskovitz is a top donor to the Prop 19 campaign, which would legalize, tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol in California. Moskovitz now runs a software company, the Times reports.)

Hard to believe Facebook would be so prudish, but here we are. JSN says that their ads have run in other places – including on Google, where the group hasn't had any problem at all.