Strengthening Our Ad Policies and Enforcement Around Prescription Drugs

Promoting prescription drugs is common practice across the healthcare industry, but it’s important to note that we prohibit the sale of prescription drugs everywhere on our platform and require advertisers to follow all applicable laws and regulations. We also prohibit ads which advocate, encourage or depict the consumption or use of illicit substances.

Requiring pre-approval and restricting where ads promoting Rx drug can run

We have long required online pharmacies to go through a certification process before running ads on Facebook. Now we’re introducing additional pre-approval requirements for telehealth providers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and online pharmacies who are looking to promote prescription drugs on our platforms.

Starting August 25, prior to promoting prescription drugs in ads on Facebook, we will require telehealth providers and online pharmacies to present written certification from Legitscript — a leading third party certification provider. Pharmaceutical manufacturers will also be required to get pre-approval from Facebook prior to running ads promoting prescription drugs.

Only pre-approved advertisers that fall into one of these three categories — online pharmacies, telehealth providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers — will be permitted to promote these products and they may only do so in the US, Canada or New Zealand. These ads must not target people under 18 years of age.

You can find more information on the application process in our Help Center.

Clarifying our policies

We know that businesses want to raise awareness and promote prescription drugs, for example in order to share information around medical efficacy, accessibility and affordability of different types of treatments. We are clarifying our policies to more clearly address these use cases, which will include the new pre-approval requirements.

Rather than a single ad policy to cover a wide range of products, we will now have three distinct policies: promotion of online pharmacies, promotions of prescription drugs and promotion of unsafe substances.

These updates will draw an important distinction between the promotion of illicit drugs and other unsafe substances, and the restricted promotion of prescription drugs by approved advertisers.

We take our enforcement in this space very seriously and continue to partner with experts and industry groups to combat illicit drug sales and opioid abuse, as well as provide support to people struggling with these issues.