Facebook’s Picky Fundraising Feature Goes Live, Only 6 Causes Allowed

In yet another bid to make itself a singular source of everything people can do online, Facebook just announced that its “Personal Fundraisers” feature is now available in beta. It’s basically the premise of GoFundMe, which is a popular platform for helping people raise money for practically anything. The biggest difference with Facebook’s clone version is the limited number of causes that people can raise funds for.

As Fortune notes, it seems Mark Zuckerberg is making good on his promise when he said that he wanted Facebook to be "a platform for all ideas” last year. The social network is slowly staking its claim on territories that are currently ruled by other entities, with fundraising being just the latest.

In the blog post that Facebook made announcing the new tool, the social media site emphasized the supposed “good” that its users get up to with various causes. It also goes into detail as to who the tool is for.

“Personal fundraisers allow people to raise money for themselves, a friend or someone or something not on Facebook, for example, a pet,” the post reads. “Personal fundraisers will launch in the US for people aged 18 years or older, and in beta over the next few weeks, as we hope to continue to learn and improve the product to make it even more useful.”

For now, it would seem that the fundraiser feature will only allow users to campaign for one of six categories, TechCrunch reports. These include education where people could raise money for tuition or books, as well as medical matters such as expensive surgeries and emergency treatments. The rest are Pets, Disaster relief, Personal emergencies, and Funeral costs.

Facebook was quick to note that it will be expanding these categories as time goes by, at which point, the social networks hopes to have worked out some of the kinks in the system. The tool will be available on select Pages and Live videos.