If you’ve been tasked with marketing a legal cannabis company or product online, chances are you’ve brushed up against, or even slammed into, various policies on social media that prevent these items from being promoted.
At the very least, a warning is usually issued, and banishment from the site altogether sits on the high end of punishment. That is why when Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation strategy in January, there was a flurry of chatter about what that meant for the cannabis sector.
Now that the dust has settled, it seems that Meta still considers cannabis, legality aside, to be on the no-no list. While they are a private company and can do what they want with their policies, it has left many in the legal Canadian industry scratching their heads as to why.
Jeff Aubin is the President of Smoker Farms in British Columbia, and he has a long history of trouble with Instagram and posting about cannabis.
“At the beginning, I posted whatever I wanted. They smacked me around a little, and then a year into it, they shut down my account,” Aubin says. “So I begged and pleaded for forgiveness and said I would do better, and then, after 7 days, I got my account back.”
Despite returning to the platform, Aubin cannot use the live setting on his primary business account on Instagram to this day. The company had initially said he would be barred from it for three months, but it still does not work. “I haven’t been able to go live for well over a year now.”
Aubin went on to say that the reason he was receiving from the company was that he couldn’t talk about anything illegal, but of course in his jurisdiction cannabis is legal. Nevertheless, Aubin did his best to comply with their demands.
“They always like to say ‘illegal’ but cannabis is legal in Canada. So the [implication] that I was talking about illegal things fell on deaf ears for me, but I knew I had to change it around a little bit.”
Aubin no longer talks about their products being available in any stores even though the Canadian government authorizes all the stores where his products are sold. Further, Aubin was shut down a couple of times when he was simply talking about clones and showing the process around their maintenance and cultivation.
“I was cutting clones, putting them in my rockwool substrate, misting them and putting them in domes, and I got shut down two to three times for that alone,” he said. “I’m not talking about anything that’s for sale, I’m showing how you take a plant, put a rooting gel on it and make it root.”
Aubin added that, at this point, when he visits a retailer selling his product, for example, he can post online that it was a “great store, great people, we talked about the industry,” and that’s about it.
Further insult to injury is the seemingly random rather than targeted policing on Instagram, Facebook, and the like, which Aubin has witnessed firsthand.
“It makes no sense to me. Even [processors I know] are always putting stuff on there saying their flower is available. If I went right now and posted something on Instagram saying my product is available I guarantee I’d be shut down within 24 hours.”
Despite the obvious challenges and double standards that exist for Smoker Farms, Aubin is still grateful he has an account to use, a luxury that some of his colleagues no longer have. “Two of my close buddies in the industry were shut down, and they have not gotten it back.”
What is Meta’s official stance?
StratCann reached out to Meta for comment but did not receive a response. However, this link on Meta’s transparency page states their current restrictions on cannabis and related products.
“Anything containing THC is listed,” said Brishna Kamal, President of Whistler Therapeutics. “That means all of the Canadian [cannabis] companies currently on Meta are in violation of one of their policies.”
As a cannabis business owner, Kamal keeps up with policy updates. She said that the current changes announced were not substantial enough for the legal cannabis industry to feel like advertising is now available to them. She handles the marketing for her organization and is still very cautious about how she discusses her business.
“I believe even simple information and characteristics are usually targeted. Even if you don’t mention the word cannabis you may get shadow-banned and then after that your account gets disabled,” she said.
Although Kamal has not had a specific issue with Meta, she recently encountered problems with another online marketing tool.
“I was using Mailchimp for five years and I was shut down right before the holidays,” she said. “I was told the reason was because Omnivore AI, which is a software they implement, picked up the word hash, and picked up the word Afghan. That’s how my campaign triggered an entire review by a human.”
You’ve got a friend in me
It may sound rather bleak if you’re a cannabis company trying to navigate these platforms to avoid triggering disciplinary action, but according to Kamal, some cannabis-friendly services do exist.
“There are [platforms] out there that are cannabis-friendly, but it’s all related to where the data is stored,” she said. Kamal went on to say that many popular newsletter platforms have servers in states where cannabis is illegal.
With her newsletter platform located in Atlanta, Georgia, Kamal discovered Flodesk, with servers in California, a vibrantly legal cannabis market. “Before I even paid them the annual fee, they confirmed over email, they are cannabis-friendly.”
Kamal concluded that if these various online platforms had servers in Canada, something that seemingly doesn’t exist now, it would go a long way for legal cannabis to market and advertise.
“[Social media and software] businesses who are marketing to different countries, the onus should be on them before they even come into the market to ensure that the data they are going to store for the people is in that country.”
