Our Prohibited Commercial Practices policy

UPDATED SEP 9, 2026
We are consolidating the policies that govern fraud, scams and deceptive commercial behavior into a single framework — one that applies consistently across content and ads, and gives us a stronger basis for enforcement.
We regularly update our Community Standards to keep pace with changes online and in the world. Scams are one of the clearest examples — they move across platforms, borders and payment systems, and the people behind them adapt quickly.
Why we are making these changes
Until now, our protections against scams have lived in more than one place. Some were covered in our Community Standards, which apply to everything on our apps, others were in our Advertising Standards. Anyone trying to understand what is allowed had to read across several documents and reconcile them.
What is changing
Our "Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices" Community Standard is now Prohibited Commercial Practices — a name that reflects what these violations are: attempts to deceive people out of their money, property or personal information.
We are retiring our standalone "Unacceptable Business Practices" ad policy and consolidating those protections into the Community Standards, so we have one consistent set of rules that applies to organic content and ads. Rules covering fake documents, money muling and money laundering facilitation are moving to our Restricted Goods and Services Community Standard, alongside related prohibitions.
What this means for enforcement
  • Broader protections against brand- and celebrity-bait scams. Scammers falsely use the name, likeness, or imagery of a public figure, together with misleading tactics to bait people into engaging with the content in an attempt to scam or defraud. With this policy update, we will be able to enforce against more celebrity-bait in ads and organic content over the coming months, at scale.
  • Transparency on the consequences for policy violations. Violations of our Prohibited Commercial Practices policy will result in a range of enforcement actions, depending on severity — we may remove content and ads, reduce distribution of content and ads, restrict advertising accounts, limit features, require advertiser verification and disable accounts — and extend penalties beyond a single ad account to associated users, Pages and business portfolios with repeat violations.
What is staying the same
Our commitment to protecting people and businesses from deceptive content and ads has not changed. We will continue to share updates on our progress in tackling deceptive content and ads, including scams, and update our policies as needed, to stay ahead of adversarial bad actors behind violating commercial practices.