Mediaboss Marketing

A gun control group founded in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is ramping up pressure on social media websites to ban gun sales on their platforms, part of a corporate policy advocacy push that has emerged as the issue of firearms regulation fades in legislatures.

Popular sites like Facebook and Instagram currently permit users to buy and sell weapons through an online marketplace, and the group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, says those policies "make it easy for minors and dangerous people to get guns online, with no questions asked."

Moms Demand Action announced this week they are in formal talks with Facebook, which also owns Instagram, to convince the company to halt gun sales. The talks are the result of a campaign, launched last month, that calls on Facebook to stop facilitating potentially illegal activity and to block easy, unregulated access to dangerous firearms. Other online social platforms, like Craigslist and Google+, prohibit gun sales.

Moms Demand Action's founder, Shannon Watts, said the group recently began conversations with Facebook about how the company can end "easy access" to guns through its website.

"Until they do, they are taking the risk that they are facilitating the illegal sale of guns on their social network. American moms are the number one demographic on Facebook and we don't want guns sold into the dangerous hands on the same site where we post our family photos," said Watts.

A petition to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom asking them to change the policy has drawn nearly 100,000 signatures.

"We've got a tremendous amount of interest in getting Facebook to change their policy," said Deborah Lewis, spokeswoman for the Central Connecticut branch of Mom's Demand Action.

Last year, the bulk of the group's lobbying efforts were legislative-focused, amid fierce gun control debates in statehouses throughout the country and in Congress. Some laws were changed, other efforts faltered, and lawmakers, for the most part, since have moved to other issues. Moms Demand Action, though committed in its push for stricter gun regulations, has turned its focus to achieving gun safety through reformed corporate policies. Last fall, after pressure from gun control advocates, Starbucks CEO and president Howard Schultz reined in a policy allowing people to bring guns into stores, and wrote an open letter asking customers to drop the weapons when they grab a cup of coffee.

Though Schultz described the policy change as a "request and not an outright ban," gun control advocates still claim the victory.

"Starbucks was a big win for us," said Lewis. "We look at gun safety from a few different angles we look at it legislatively, but it's many-pronged."

Read this article:
Gun Control Group Wants Sales On Social Media Stopped