Chuck Rossi takes a selfie at gun range with Facebook administrative assistant Jamie Tolen. Rossi, a director of engineering at Facebook, is an avid shooter and has trained hundreds of his colleagues how to shoot pistols. (caption and photo courtesy forbes.com)

Responding to pressure from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and other gun control groups, Facebook has banned gun sales on its service. As forbes.com reports, the ban is a bust. Matt Drange offers five reasons gun sales continue on the site: Facebook relies entirely on user reports for enforcement of its policy, secret groups make it impossible for outsiders to flag suspected sales, Facebook doesn’t have an option for reporting gun sales, gun owners have come up with ways to advertise guns in clandestine ways and Chuck Rossi (the pro-gunner behind the scenes at Facebook, above). All of which proves . . .

You can’t stop the signal. That said, Facebook can. It can ban all firearms-related content on their website. Sad but true: the only way they can stop private gun sales — which are prima facie legal — is to pull the plug on all gun-related pages.

Will they? I reckon one high-profile shooting by someone who bought a gun on Facebook will be the catalyst for a total gun ban. Pressure from a Clinton-led White House would no doubt increase the likelihood of a blackout.

Meanwhile, many of us in the business of providing gun info suspect that Facebook has changed its algorithm to limit sharing of firearms pages’ posts. TTAG has seen a sudden, dramatic and unexplained drop in our Facebook traffic, down from 20 percent of our main site page views to well under 10 percent. Other gun pages report a similar fall off.

If Facebook does go full retard anti-gun, the impact on their traffic will be negligible. But the impact on sites like Gunbroker and Armslist will be dramatic. Not to mention gun-oriented Facebook wanna-be’s. Unfortunately, that will perpetuate the ghettoization of American gun culture, already banned from advertising in the mainstream media.

Watch this Face. I mean, space.

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76 COMMENTS

  1. Who cares? Facebook sucks. One cog in the large scale machine destroying communication in the world. Stop getting on facebook. Suddenly it doesnt matter anymore.

    • Oh, but it does matter.

      Facebook has analytic programs that run in the background on most websites. Even TTAG isn’t totally free of this because they run Facebook Social Plugins.

      Facebook worms it’s way into a great many websites to collect data on you, me and everyone else who uses that website. You can detect and block some of it with Ghostery, but some of the stuff is pretty much unblockable even with other software that can detect it but not protect you from it.

      • They can’t log your data if you are not on Facebook. I have never ever had a Facebook account, and never ever will. I don’t know why someone would find it necessary to go to this blog’s Facebook page instead of coming here. Same with GunBroker.

        • Some places of employment use firewalls for *forbidden* topics like porn and guns.

          TTAG’s Facebook page neatly side-steps those blacklists…

        • They can’t log your data if you are not on Facebook. I have never ever had a Facebook account, and never ever will.

          They can and they do whether you like it or not, in fact, you don’t even have to believe it. This is what things like Facebook Connect, Facebook Social Graph and Facebook Custom Audience do. It’s exactly what they do.

          Download and install Ghostery and leave the blocking feature off. Then head over to Breitbart News and you’ll find all these programs plus Google Ad Services, Google Analytics, Google Syndication and Google Tag Manager are running in the background of that website and collecting data on you. In fact there are 40+ trackers on Breitbart.

          Think you’re safe at TTAG? Oh man are you in for a shocker. This site is running running, as far as I can tell, 108 trackers on you right now if you’re not blocking them. Yes, one hundred and eight. Probably more in reality. These things are not called “trackers” for no reason. Tracking YOU is what they do.

          Long gone are the days of just not accepting cookies my friend. You’re being tracked by Google, Facebook and a ton of other companies. Unless you’re actively protecting yourself, they’re gathering a boatload of data on your online habits.

          Don’t take my word for it though. Like I said, go get the Ghostery plugin and Ad Block Plus. Reload TTAG and disable blocking for both programs. Just watch the list that gets populated up the right hand side of your screen. Then come back and tell me they can’t log your data. Like I said AT LEAST 108 trackers running on TTAG right now.

        • In fact here. You don’t have to do any work at all. Here’s what Ghostery finds right here on this website. Part of our conversation is in the background to prove this screenshot is real and just made.

          Look in the upper right hand corner and you’ll see a little ghost with the number 109 under him. That’s the number of trackers on this site. Then look at that big purple list on the right hand side, that’s a portion of what’s running because the list is too big for a single screen to hold.

          https://www.anony.ws/image/JK1Z

        • Tom:

          No problem.

          Oh, and no one should take this as me trashing TTAG, a good chunk of this is coming in via the ads that the site is running, which is how they keep this site from going members only. The same is true of Breitbart and a lot of other sites that are free but driven by advertising revenue.

          The problem isn’t just the tracking it’s that this stuff gunks up everything. I’m running a computer with 32Gb of RAM, a motherboard that’s less than three months old and a 4.0Ghz quad core Intel processor. All that with a 10Mpbs+ connection and it takes Ghostery nearly 40 seconds to detect all that crap.

        • I don’t get it either, Mark. FB seems like a colossal waste of time to me. I get how one can make money off of other people’s foolishness, I just don’t get why people are foolish to begin with.

          As for sidestepping employer bans, there are smart phones and tablets for that.

        • I don’t believe it. Incremental profit for intentional clicks on moronic/annoying popup ads. Ads purchased on this site or google or faceplant. It’s BS there is no way that is a profitable “business model”. A ponzi scheme to transfer $ from sucker/”investrors” into the pocket of Zuckleburgler.

        • @Wilson
          Ghostery only shows me 15. But I also don’t have settings at maximum block, I just left them at defaults.

          Edit:
          I changed it to max block and it went down to 14.

      • If people of the gun stopped using the facebook then TTAG would have no good reason to have any part of it running on the site. Supply and Demand: if the demand is nonexistent then supply will dry up.

      • Matt:

        Are you also running something like Ad Block Plus? Anything that blocks certain features in toto will block things before Ghostery gets to them. As I said before, a lot of this isn’t just TTAG doing this, it’s the ads they’re running. Those ads come with all sorts of “extras” that keep track of who views a page their on, how many views it gets etc.

        I only get 15 unless I turn off ABP, then it jumps to over 100.

  3. They can’t ban you, if you ban them first. I left FB over a year ago, and have never regretted it.

    • I still have an account, but stopped posting or checking it about 4 months ago. I really don’t miss it.

    • That’s fine for you (and me), but Robert and TTAG are in the business of attracting eyeballs, and its bad when they lose access to key channels for garnering those eyeballs. Younger folks (under 30) have been found to use social media (FB, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) much more, and the rest of the “traditional” internet much less, than us older folks.

      • Don’t want to be an American idiot.
        One nation controlled by the media.
        Information Age of hysteria.
        It’s calling out to idiot America.

        Welcome to a new kind of tension.
        All across the idiot nation.
        Where everything isn’t meant to be okay.
        Television dreams of tomorrow.
        We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow.
        For that’s enough to argue.

        — Green Day

        • “…the future’s uncertain and the end is always near…”

          —–The Doors

        • I see a bad moon rising.
          I see trouble on the way.
          I see earthquakes and lightnin’.
          I see bad times today.

          -CCR

    • And to the people who say to this; ‘it’s not censorship, it’s a private company, they do what they want’. uh, sure private.

      They are a corporation that at the level of upper management has close ties to the state, benefits from cooperating with the state in the form of tax laws and various regulations, not to mention cozy business relationships and suchlike. One corporation of many that all do the same thing.

      The line between the state and the corporation is blurry at best, at worst is no line at all.

      Meaning it’s censorship at some level greater than zero.

      And that’s just one part of the problem. How would you like it if google and facebook and all the rest of them basically share all of their data with the NSA? What would prevent them from doing so as they are a ‘private’ business? Do you not think the state wouldn’t be very interested in this information? What you are performing internet searches for… what you are emailing to your friends… Google is on your phone and knows where you go all the time, who you call, who calls you, who’s in your address book, who’s addressbook you are in, where they go, and what they search on the internet, etc. etc. etc.

      ‘censorship’ is the least of our problems. But it’s still censorship, period.

    • Facebook is a social networking site created by a couple innovative white guys, for a college they went to, which was ripped off by a jew they hired to help with programming and launching the site. Now it’s the biggest thing on the internet for news, groups, and advertisement, and the jew con artist gets billions from it and all the companies that use it’s programs connected to other sites, to spy on you and spam you with “targeted advertisements”.

      • Does him being Jew have any relevance to origins of how facebook came to be? If not, then it kind of takes away from the point.

        • How does a simple fact, relevant or not, “take away from the point?”

          The point is there whether ancillary information is included or not.

          Oh, I see…what you are saying is that if someone includes an irrelevant fact in the making of a point it makes them fair game for an ad hominem.

          Is that it? Because he included an irrelevant fact, some Concern Troll gets to attack the messenger and say his point lost “force” or something?

          Please, can we just replace ONE “Social Justice” class on ONE college campus with an actual LOGIC class? Pretty please?

  7. I honestly don’t think it will take a shooting or anything beyond Mark just waking up one day and deciding to do it.

    • Hardly, he has stock holders to report to. Let us say it is 50/50 people who are Left Leaning and those Right Leaning. If he pisses off 50% of his users, how do you think that FB stock will go? They make a money by selling data from spying on use speech and pictures. If he makes a site that is an echo chamber of a single voice, even advertisers will leave. Nope, he has to walk the line.

      He will play games to appease the progressive Borg but I doubt he will wake up one day and say, Okay, done

      • “Let us say it is 50/50 people who are Left Leaning and those Right Leaning.”

        Entirely an unsupported assumption.

  8. I’m thinking that the reason your FB page has dropped in hits is because more and more people on “our” side have quit the liberal echo-chamber called Facebook.

      • I got into guns about the same time as I got into tech, during high school half a decade ago. Despite that, I do not, have not, and will not have a Facebook account because I recognize the site’s uses for involuntary data tracking. I also tend to associate with people who, due to age or similar worries as myself, do not use it. Mark Zuckerberg has to be one of the greatest leftist mouthpieces in recent history- he and his software can go suck-start a sidearm for all I care.

  9. It sounds like it’s time to create our own social network site. We already have a gun video site, full30.com.

    We can also use code words for gun sales, like “puppy for sale, answers to ‘Glock’, youngest of a litter of 19.”

    • New Social media just for Pro-2A FS/T site:
      NOTE: Don’t use Facebook login yet ( still glitzy ) and when you come to “Profile Address or URL”, that is “yourname” w/o spaces. e.g. “alexoakgomez”.
      Sign up as “FREE Membership”, not PAID. This Site does not Track nor Sell your information.

      Texas and National Gun Groups Stand Alone Site, not hosted nor at the perils of of advertising tracking. We’re on our cluster servers and fiberline in a data center.

      http://www.socialguntrader.com

  10. I don’t use Facebook. I have this site saved to my phone and check it frequently throughout the day.

  11. Your content has strayed from gear and guns to writing reactionary posts that say the same thing in response to obscure editorials from local TV stations. It works to keep the reactionary circle jerk that is the comments section here going, but to the casuals I am guessing make up a vast majority of your visits it doesn’t work. Perhaps that is why your visits are down.

    • ^^^ This. A 1000x this. You used to have news, now you have click bait. No thanks. I think I’m done coming back for awhile.

    • It will take quite a long time, but eventually it will likely die out.

      Facebook expends vast resources in marketing-promoting their product, far more than MySpace ever did…

  13. If you are still using Facebook then stop bitching about Facebook. It is making you look dumb.

  14. I probably need to get on Fakebook and pretend I am a young teenage high school girl like my daughter’s 40 year old male high school Spanish teacher did.
    I don’t call it Fakebook for nothing and no I do not have an account..

  15. Yeah I’m on FB. If they ban all gun related crap I’ll do something else. And just use it for friends and relatives. Like I always do.

    • There’s a progun copy of Fakebook out there, as well as a tea party copy.

  16. Never really used it once the govt started actively monitoring it. Used to be neoliberal; now it’s more like neomarxist. You can post, “Kill all whites,” or “kill all Jews” on there, but they censor all dissent or news about the Islamists’ mass assaults on Germans.

  17. Responding to pressure from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and other gun control groups

    Nonsense. Mark Zuckerbag is a punk and doesn’t need any pressure from anyone to be an anti-gun zealot.

  19. Organized pro-gun groups need to facilitate getting their members to buy considerable shares of Facebook and start pressuring the company at the stockholders meetings. You can’t make a company do something if they know you can’t harm them financially. Facebook is positioning to become one of the most powerful information sources in the world. We have two choices. Either retract from the company and watch from the sidelines as it controls the 2A message the way it chooses to warp it or make sure people favorable to our message have enough pull in the company to at least keep it neutral.

  21. My Ghostery only counts 12. So I have a hard time trying to delete my FB profile, but I guess I can just log on and make a post about guns and I will be banned.

    • Once when I was tired of facespace, I went on and asked, “What exactly do I need to say here to get banned?” Never got a reply. Finally followed someone’s instructions here on TTAG and deleted my account. Yeah, I know I’m never really deleted from The Matrix, but… um, something or other. I don’t know, the muscle relaxers for my torqued back might be doing most of the typing today.

  22. The Facebook wouldn’t let me join– I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I hear they’ve expanded the membership later; too bad for them. I have my standards too.

  23. I stopped following your FB links, hell I think I unfollowed TTAG, after months of your post links not working. That drove me insane.

  25. If it weren’t for promoting stuff from Guns Save Life via Facebook, I would have been gone long ago myself.

    Once they ban gun-related content, I’ll fold my facebook page and won’t miss it a bit.

    John

  26. Thing is I’ve visited some of the pages in question, and a lot, won’t say all, but a lot are requiring a background check in order to complete the transaction. So can’t say all are buying and selling illegally.

  27. You cannot buy a gun on Facebook. You can arrange the sale of a gun using Facebook to facilitate the communication. If they ban gun-related content it’s a straight up censorship move. Which means that we should put pressure on them to ban other content which we find offensive. If they want to start a precedent, we should help them along in their decision to censor user content.

  28. Ironically guns brought me back to Facebook. After a long period of leaving my account dormant I’m back on the social network participating in clubs and classes to assist women interested in shooting. Facebook is a great way to find and communicate with people, and plan upcoming events, despite its drawbacks.

  29. They even seem to mute gun related posts… Like I made a video of my girlfriend target shooting in the desert and barely anyone saw it. It didn’t even pop up on her feed. These people need to stay out of politics and simply provide the service we want.

  31. If you say so. Personally I’ve seen little impact between a FB presence and a lack of one. It’s necessary to keep in mind that FB has a billion users (or whatever the current ad-driven claim is) in the same way some random forum has 10 thousand. By the time you adjust for duplicate accts, trolls, Spammers, people that left in a huff, people that never posted after the first time, people that wander in ever three months, etc,etc, FB has maybe 10% of that claimed figure. Even hits and views are not realistically presented…and they certainly don’t present actual traffic realistically to FB pages and groups.

    FB is a fad. It’s already peaked. What comes next I have no idea but Suckerbug has just about milked this cow for all it’s worth. Watch and get back to me in 18 months or so and we’ll see how intimidating FB, or any action FB might take, looks then.

  32. Get Tails, off of the TOR website, use sock accounts for everything, learn how to use TOR, tails, kali linux etc, you can hide

  33. I do not understand how Facebook can be anti-guns? In my feed I get ads from Ruger, NRA, Leupold, MAD Dog Customs, All Outdoors, Hickhock45, and lots of others. Seriously, name one firearm related company that does not have a Facebook feed. Banning sales? Okay, fine. I’d rather peruse Armslist.

  34. Gun owners should sue facebook. If gays can sue florists and bakers then gun owners can sue facebook. People need to wake up and fight back.

  35. Face book monitors Firearm information with such enthusiasm it would make the Gestapo drool, NSA jealous, IRS envious, and ATF Happy! Whee else can the Government gather Free Information from people who reveal private information about them selves to complete strangers!

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