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You may have seen the kerfuffle over Facebook and pharma companies that’s just blown up. In brief, pharmaceutical companies used to be able to whitelist comments on their Facebook pages, mainly because of regulatory concerns and uncertainty over the FDA’s position on social media.

It’s not just pharma–managers of disease awareness pages and what-have-you could ask Facebook to turn commenting and ‘like’-ing off on a per-case basis.

That’s all changing now: Facebook have decreed that all pages will be equal and anybody can comment or like anything, pharma and the FDA be blowed. There’s a rather obscure question running on a Facebook poll page on the issue, and m’learned friend Nigel at Eastmond Medicomm comments,

I am for commenting on non-brand pages, but against commenting on drug-specific pages because of the barriers that FDA has thrown up in opening dialogue and providing balance on AE reports.

Do you think he’s got this right? I must admit I’m not up to speed on the FDA issues, but check out the Facebook poll and report back!