Facebook Will Allow Brands to Send You Ads If You’ve Already Sent Them Messages
Earlier this year, Facebook announced the creation of bots that will allow businesses to communicate with you on Messenger. The company has now announced sponsorship messages. They are similar to ads, but for your chat application.
According to Facebook, if you send a message to a company, it has permission to send you sponsored messages or, as we call them, advertisements. These will be spontaneous ads with “targeted in context”. Companies that already have chatbots set up can start using the new feature right away.
If you don’t want ads to appear in your messaging app, the simplest solution is to never send messages to the company. It’s unclear if Facebook makes a distinction between its automated chatbots and simply posting messages to a Facebook page in the hopes of attracting a person. It would be very painful if you had to passively subscribe to ads to ask support questions. Again, in-app messaging ads are likely to be a problem no matter how they are launched.
Messaging Platform v1.3 Features | Facebook via Neowin