Twitter might ban crypto ads too

Twitter is reportedly preparing to implement a crypto ad ban à la Facebook and Google in the next two weeks. The so-called ban would block ads associated with cryptocurrency wallets, exchanges and ICOs, or initial coin offerings, “with exceptions." A Twitter rep did not deny the report in an email exchange Monday morning but declined to comment further. Similar ad bans by Facebook in early February and Google last week have won praise from the crypto community for rooting out gimmicky get-rich-quick projects without much technical merit that have raised a lot of money but created an unfortunate situation for serious participants and observers, who suffer from the recklessness and misguidedness of the uninformed majority. Nevertheless, the "brazen scams" continued to be promoted across Twitter. Less than two weeks ago CEO Jack Dorsey popped up to respond to a plea by Cornell University professor and IC3 director Emin Gün Sirer, saying that Twitter is working on managing that kind of activity.

We are on it.

— jack (@jack) March 6, 2018

Dorsey also runs Square, which in the last five months has introduced bitcoin trading to users of Square Cash, its peer-to-peer payments app. Twitter has become one of the most dominant places for discussion among blockchain and crypto community members and as such, many of them, like JPMorgan Chase's Amber Baldet most recently, have seen fake account impersonating them, with the aim of using their influence to raise money.

— Amber (@AmberBaldet) March 14, 2018

More recently, the serious and active participants have kept to invite-only Telegram or Slack groups. Celebrities like Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather have also taken to the social media platform to announce their own endorsements of ICOs to raise cash. In November, U.S. regulators issued an official warning that such endorsements could be breaking U.S. securities laws requiring anyone backing an investment opportunity to disclose their relationship to the company offering it. “I get 20 ICO pitches in my inbox everyday,” Jalak Jobanputra, founding partner at FuturePerfect Ventures, recently told Tearsheet. “There’s allocation for marketing and that’s been an avenue where they just blanket the web and social networks and certainly use them excessively for the marketing of these ICOs.”