Merchandise for sale is displayed at the 2015 NRA Annual Convention in Nashville, Tennessee on April 10, 2015 (Karen Bleier / AFP)

Facebook did not say it would remove NRA supporters

This article is more than one year old.
Published on July 6, 2020 at 23:12
1 min read
By Claire SAVAGE, AFP USA

Facebook posts shared more than 200,000 times claim the social network will remove users who announce support for the National Rifle Association. This is false, a Facebook spokeswoman said such a statement would not violate its community standards, and the gun rights organization has maintained a public page on the site for years.

“Well Facebook said that if you support the NRA you will get kicked off. Well let’s experiment. I Support the NRA how about y’all,” reads a post shared June 29, 2020.

Screenshot of a false Facebook post taken on July 6, 2020

More examples of the Facebook post are available here, here and here.

A Facebook company spokeswoman told AFP in an email: “The statement... is not true” and supporting the NRA “does not violate our community standards.”

The NRA’s official Facebook page dates to 2013, and the organization is also on Facebook-owned Instagram.

Screenshot of the official National Rifle Association Facebook page taken on July 6, 2020

Facebook’s community standards are available here, and searching the regulations for the terms “NRA” and “National Rifle Association” yielded no results.

However, “the purchase, sale, gifting, exchange, and transfer of firearms, including firearm parts or ammunition, between private individuals on Facebook” is prohibited, according to the Regulated Goods section of the rules.

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