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Opinion
Parmy Olson

Guns Are Banned on Facebook, But Sellers Find a Way

It’s still too easy to glorify real-world violence and buy guns on the social media platform. 

More moderators needed.

More moderators needed.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Close to 70% of American adults use Facebook. They peruse the pages of old school friends, browse cooking videos and click on titillating news headlines. Once in a while, they will also stumble across a video of a live shooting or buy a semi-automatic rifle with relative ease. 

The pattern of mass shootings in the US, highlighted in the past two weeks with massacres in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, has roots in political, cultural and structural issues, but the contribution of social media ,and Facebook in particular, to violence in the country shouldn’t be ignored.