August 31, 2010 – A funny thing happened last week with our Just Say Now campaign. Well, a couple of “funny” things. Large online communities proved, en masse, that they were waaaay ahead of both corporate America and our political leadership when it comes to their readiness to discuss an end to marijuana prohibition.

Moreover, it’s an issue they feel very strongly about.

Facebook Just Says No

Facebook initially approved and ran 38 million impressions of the “Just Say Now” ad featuring our logo, a marijuana leaf in a “speech” balloon. The logo is a very specific symbol of what the Just Say Now campaign is trying to do: get people to talk about marijuana policy. It transcends the boundaries of culture, language and class.

Inexplicably, Facebook suddenly banned the ads. They subsequently gave us ever-shifting excuses as to why they did so — we were told that “that the image in question was no long[er] acceptable for use in Facebook ads. The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies.”

But the Just Say Now campaign isn’t trying to get people to smoke more pot. Americans consume 113 billion dollars worth of weed each year, so I doubt that would even be possible. Rather, it’s a political campaign directly related to ballot initiatives in five states this November. As Michael Whitney of the Just Say Now campaign said, “It’s like running a campaign and saying you can’t show the candidate’s face.”

The ads with the marijuana leaf in them were iconic, immediately recognizable in Facebook’s small ad format to anyone who cares about the issue. The ads with that logo performed twice as well as any other ad on Facebook. Moreover, Facebook knew this. They could see the same statistics we could.

Maybe Facebook would like to give up the use of the blue Facebook “F” button that is ubiquitous across the internet? In a 2.0 world, the Just Say Now logo of a marijuana leaf in a speech balloon is just as important to us.

We launched a petition to get Facebook to reverse its decision, and took out ads on both right and left blogs across the internet. We asked people to replace their Facebook avatars with Just Say Now logos with “censored” across the marijuana leaf.

Much to our surprise, it caused a minor tsunami in the media:

Ryan Grim’s story drew 6,282 comments, was retweeted 4,365 times, and shared on Facebook 5,597 times off the Huffington Post alone.

The story was covered everywhere:
Boing Boing PC World CBS News UPI NBC Gawker Wired
Alternet IT World Mediaite LA Weekly Network World Computerworld Reuters
Bay Area Indymedia Colorado Springs Independent Drug War Chronicle San Fransicso Chronicle Product Reviews OverTheLimit Fast Company
Newser MyStateline HULIQ Gather Adotas NewsOXY Young Turks
Independent Political Report 420 Times SmartTrend St. Louis Globe-Democrat Arizona Daily Wildcat Austin Chronicle Herald & Review
LA Times CNET PoliJAM CWCBD RightTV Thaindian CIO
Drug War Rant Liberty Papers Marketing Pilgrim Small Gov Times Salem Libertarian Examiner Computerworld UK The Olympian
Lexington Herald Leader Modesto Bee Myrtl Beach Sun News Centre Daily Times Bellingham Herald The Republic Sun Herald
Kansas City Star Belleville News Democrat Macon Telegraph Good Gear Guide Computerworld Austrailia Stop the Drug War LA Times Blog
OC Weekly IT World Atlantic SF Weekly NY Times LAist CNET

We couldn’t measure the impact of the campaign across Facebook itself. The Just Say Now avatars seemed to be everywhere. But when we asked the Facebook folks if they knew how many had been swapped out, they said they didn’t know.

Google Says Yes

At the same time we launched the campaign to get Facebook to relent, we also submitted the ads with the Just Say Now logo to Google. Google said they’d run them, and subsequently got a lot of good press for that decision.

From the LA Times:

“Facebook’s concocted prissiness over political advocacy is more to be disparaged than imitated,” Bruce Fein, a lawyer and author who worked in President Reagan’s Justice Department and a Just Say Now advisory board member, said in a statement. “Freedom of expression is made of sterner stuff. Google deserves applause for exposing Facebook to shame.”

We also learned that Facebook had done the same thing to the Libertarian Party. On July 23, Facebook pulled the ads they had already approved for the campaign that was getting very successful:

We do not allow ads for marijuana or political ads for the promotion of marijuana and will not allow the creation of any further Facebook Ads for this product.

But Facebook subsequently accepted the Just Say Now logo ads on August 7, so that was a crock.

Conde Nast and Reddit Go To War Over Just Say Now Ads

When they heard that Facebook wouldn’t run the Just Say Now ads, the Reddit advertising sales people contacted us. Reddit has several popular marijuana pages (“sub-reddits, or redit sites dedicates to specific topics and managed by users). It seemed like a natural fit.

But Reddit’s owners, Conde Nast, decided to big foot the decision. Not only did they ban the image, they banned all marijuana issue-related advertising, saying “As a corporation, Conde Nast does not want to benefit financially from this particular issue.”

Michael Whitney wrote this post on FDL:
Reddit Won’t Run Any Display Ads for Marijuana Legalization

We submitted it to Reddit, and within hours, the community was in an uproar. The Reddit site has 5 million unique users a month who tend to be tech savvy, and they instantly began turning on “ad blockers” to deny Reddit and Conde Nast advertising revenue in the wake of the decision.

We didn’t have much of a way to measure the user revolt impact on Facebook, but shortly after Michael’s post appeared, this was what Reddit looked like:

The Reddit staff responded by saying that the decision by Conde Nast was made without consulting them, and they called it “bullshit.” The staff signed their names to a dissent letter, and said that the would run the Just Say Now ads for free. The Just Say Now ads are running now on the Reddit site.

Wired’s Ryan Singel has a good rundown of the Reddit/Conde Nast controversy on Wired.

EFF Enters the Debate

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote an important piece on the controversy surrounding the ads. In it, they said Facebook’s refusal to run the ads threatened to deprive voters of important information regarding the ballot initiatives this fall:

Facebook should lift the ban and show Just Say Now’s political ads. For better or worse, Facebook has become a important means of communication and organization for candidates and political campaigns. In this role, Facebook functions best as a neutral platform, hosting the debate without entering it. Whether or not Facebook wants to restrict depictions of smoking in commercial ads, it should not prohibit the open and robust political debate central to the value and promise of the Internet.

NYU Journalism school professor Jay Rosen also weighed in, saying “So Facebook is deciding what the sphere of deviance is now? They were supposed to be a platform.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

I had lunch with Allen St. Pierre of NORML on Friday. He’s been working with the organization for 20 years, and day in, day out they act as a resource for people who need help when they are arrested.

“By the time I get back to the office, 100 people will have called wanting help,” he said. The group has performed an extremely valuable service for decades now, and polls indicate that 25% of Americans know the NORML brand and what it stands for.

Allen indicated that one of the things the marijuana reform movement has been missing is a sustained messaging campaign around the need to end marijuana prohibition. He was happy that the major groups had now joined together with both law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, across party lines, to do just that as part of the Just Say Now campaign.

As Mexican President Felipe Calderon said only weeks ago, we need to start having a conversation about the possibility of ending marijuana prohibition. The war on drugs has clearly failed, and US marijuana policy is threatening the stability not only of Mexico but of Columbia and other Latin American nations. It’s also causing a crisis on our borders. Our prison population has quadrupled since Nancy Reagan began her “Just Say No” campaign in the mid-80s, and both the social and economic burden have become crushing.

The Just Say Now campaign will continue to fight to bring the discussion of marijuana policy reform out into the open. Our goal is to free it from the demagoguerey of the culture wars, and the sniggering insinuation that the only ones who care about the issue are potheads. It’s not “unserious.” It’s a matter of national security, and for many, an issue of life and death.

The decision of Facebook and Conde Nast to suppress legitimate political speech was roundly rejected by vast numbers of users within their communities. The Just Say Now campaign applauds those who are willing to step forward and declare their support for ending marijuana prohibition. It is a critical first action that people must take before we can have a sane and rational drug policy in this country, and the courage of those who are willing to do so is exemplary.

Sign the peition: Ask President Obama to end the war on marijuana.

Pot leaves are easy to find on Facebook pages. But the nation’s largest social-networking site has decided they cannot appear in advertisements, prohibiting them as “illegal content.”

The policy was disclosed Tuesday after a national campaign promoting legalization accused Facebook of censoring political speech. The Just Say Now campaign said the popular website rejected its ads after they had run for more than a week. The ads featured the readily recognizable leaf and asked the website’s users to “sign the petition to President Obama to support states’ rights to legalize marijuana.”

“We’re not allowed to show the image of the candidate that we are advancing,” said Michael Whitney, with Firedoglake.com, a progressive blog that is part of the campaign. “That’s why we’re calling out Facebook for this really backwards decision.”

Facebook said it has not banned the ad promoting legalization, just the leaf. “We’d like to reiterate that Just Say Now can promote their campaign and petition through Facebook Ads as long as they use another image,” said Annie Ta, a spokeswoman.

But Whitney said the ad with the pot leaf was twice as effective as one with Obama’s image. “It was really critical to the success of our campaign,” he said.

The campaign for Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana in California, has a Facebook page, but the pot leaf is nowhere to be found. Instead, the campaign’s image is an orange and yellow sun, reminiscent of vintage packing crate labels for the state’s legal agricultural products.

“It just symbolizes hope, change, new day, new horizon,” said Dale Sky Jones, a campaign spokeswoman.

Jones said the campaign deliberately chose not to use a cannabis leaf or the color green because it could distract from the message that marijuana should be regulated and taxed and might prevent the campaign from advertising with some media. “It’s not that the leaf itself is an evil image. It’s that some folks have a negative connotation attached to it,” she said.

The Marijuana Policy Project, which promotes legalization nationwide, also does not use the pot leaf. “There is still so much stigma associated with that,” said Mike Meno, a spokesman.

One of Facebook’s co-founders, Dustin Moskovitz, is a top donor to Proposition 19. He has contributed at least $20,000, according to campaign finance reports. Moskovitz, who now runs a software company, declined to comment.

Whitney said the Just Say Now campaign, a joint project of Firedoglake.com and Students for Sensible Drug Policy, ran the ads on Google for less than a day without concern from the company.

Diana Adair, a spokeswoman for Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., said she could not comment on specific advertisers. But, she said, “an ad for a political issue with an image depicting a marijuana leaf would likely be acceptable under our policies.”

Facebook, which is based in Palo Alto, offered shifting explanations for its decision. The Just Say Now campaign said the website informed the campaign last week that the image was not acceptable under its policy on ” smoking products.” But no such policy is included in its advertising guidelines and Facebook did not respond to several requests for the policy.

On Tuesday, Ta said the pot leaf was excluded because Facebook does not allow images of drugs, drug paraphernalia or tobacco in ads and then later said, “Our advertising policies prohibit the paid promotion of illegal content.” The policy bans tobacco ads. It says nothing specific about drugs or drug paraphernalia , but it indicates that ads cannot contain or promote “unlawful content” or “illegal activity.”

Ta did not respond to a request to explain how the image of a pot leaf, commonplace in popular culture, was illegal content.

“We want Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views, while respecting the rights and feelings of others,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Our team has worked with Just Say Now directly and explained our policies in depth.”

Whitney said Facebook conveyed neither of Ta’s explanations. He said that before Facebook’s “abrupt turnaround,” a representative worked with the campaign on the ad and indicated that the image was the most important element. “Then they banned our logo,” he said.

The ad was targeted to Facebook users whose demographics and interests suggested they might support legalization. Whitney said it was displayed 38 million times, but he would not disclose how many Facebook users clicked it or how many signed the petition. “We were bringing new people in the door and identifying people we could not otherwise have hoped to identify,” he said.

Facebook has numerous pages that include images of marijuana leaves and buds, including some that are devoted to growing marijuana, which remains a federal crime. Ta noted that the website has different policies for its free users. One of the many responsibilities listed in that policy is that users “will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful.”

The Just Say Now campaign also has a Facebook page and it uses the pot leaf logo. But the campaign has now partly covered it with a black bar reading: “Censored.” Source.