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Twitter Advertising Ban Embraced By Crypto Community – Reactions

ICO News, Investing, News, Regulation | March 27, 2018 By:

Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Google, Twitter today banned initial coin offering (ICO), token sales, crypto exchanges and wallet services advertising, thereby further narrowing the paid options for companies in the sector. Some reactions on what it means:

Craig Sproule, Crowd Machine Founder and CEO, a platform helping companies adopt blockchain by enabling anyone at a company to build apps 45x faster without code:

 “As the crypto community continues to grow on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, so do the pervasive scams that seek to take advantage of people interested in the space. As a company with a legitimate offering, it’s crucial to recognize the underlying power of blockchain technology and how it will impact the world beyond the current hype. It’s not surprising that Twitter is banning crypto ads and hopefully this decision will help stifle bad actors so that in the future, ads for good projects can live across these platforms.

Daniel Duarte, CTO of Auctus, the world’s first retirement plan platform powered by blockchain:

“It’s alarmingly easy to set up a cryptocurrency wallet, create a fake website, publish the wallet’s public address and collect money from people with little knowledge about this market and about cryptocurrencies in general. It’s important for the community and investors to do their own research, learning more about the projects they are willing to invest in. 

Since Twitter can’t analyze on a case-by-case basis and filter the scams, we believe it’s better to ban them all. This will not hurt the crypto community, and ultimately is a good thing for less experienced investors. 

 Ads are not the worst problem on Twitter: there are thousands of fake accounts impersonating influential people in the crypto space, such as Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance exchange, and VItalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. Whenever one of these verified accounts tweets something, hundreds of retweets and comments with fake offerings immediately flood the network with wallet addresses for phishing. Now, Twitter should focus on a solution for account impersonation.”

 Andy Bromberg, CoinList CEO:

 “There is a tremendous number of low-quality projects in the cryptocurrency space — frauds, scams, and poorly thought-out concepts. This early in the industry, most businesses simply don’t have the resources and expertise to properly evaluate such token companies and separate the wheat from the chaff. In some cases, it may make sense for these businesses to take a step back from the industry and build their knowledge. Companies like CoinList and others rely on deep internal experience with digital asset technologies to make determinations about quality.”

Dan Novaes, co-founder and CEO of Current, a blockchain-based media streaming app:

“The fake ICOs that flood social media platforms with ads and rely on scams to gain support hurt the entire industry, so I’m in favor of cracking down on business practices that are not legitimate. The good actors in this space have many more tools to use than just ads on Facebook, Google and Twitter.”

 Trey Ditto, CEO of Ditto, a crypto and ICO PR firm, whose clients include Monero, CoinList and SFox:

“Twitter and Facebook have bigger problems – like selling our data, altering elections and allowing hate to spread through bots and fake profiles. It’s hard not to laugh when a company like Twitter – that promotes millions of fake profiles and allows people to buy fake followers and likes – all of a sudden has a moral compass in the crypto space.

“Blockchain, tokens and even Web 3.0 are direct threats to companies like Twitter who for too long have dishonestly acquired, sold and even lost consumer data, but we are moving into a new world where peer-to-peer transactions eliminate the need for large distrusted institutions and we can remain private or at least control who does and doesn’t have access to our information.

 “I’m curious to see where the line in the sand is actually drawn by Twitter and other social media platforms. In the crypto community, there are a small, handful of bad players – just like there are in any industry – and they should be dealt with accordingly. I don’t think that means we should ban every company that’s utilizing social media to educate potential investors.”