Why Does Facebook Hate This Woman? | Hacker News Reader

Why Does Facebook Hate This Woman?

whattofix.com

I don't think Facebook hate small advertisers, I think they do (1) Care about ad quality (2) Care about short term gain.

Facebook have really made a big drive to get rid of affiliate rebills, etc. as Facebook users view them as scams and they end up damaging Facebook's reputation.

From my experience if you have a legitimate business it's unlikely that FB are going to reject your ads. Facebook want your money, the only reason they'll not want your money is if the ads will cost them more reputational damage then the money they bring in.

I think their drive for short term gains has led them to some decisions which are damaging to small businesses (CPC pricing, no frequency capping), but thinking "they're out to get you" is just simple paranoia in my opinion.

The site you were advertising looks like a health scam site (not saying that it is; just that's what it looks like on first impression), did Facebook specifically reject your ad on the basis of your image or due to the nature of your site? (i.e were other ads with the exact same details approved)

It was specifically rejected because of the image. "...The image included in your ad is not suitable to appear on Facebook..."

Interesting. A lot of advertisers have been complaining about ad cloning for a while, where companies clone the adverts from their competitors. I wonder if Facebook have introduced some sort of automated filter to reject clone images, etc. or if they're just manually rejecting the ones that have been vastly overused.

On my blog fan page (visible from the site), I post funny pictures several times a day -- it's a habit I got into months ago.

I've found lately that if I pick up a funny pic from the web, sometimes FB recognizes it and won't take it. But if I shave it some -- change the dimensions -- then it goes through okay.

So yes, there is something going on there.

If your ad was rejected because the ad violated copyright, then that breaks the premise of your post. That doesn't mean your conclusions are automatically wrong, but it does mean they can't follow from your premise.

I guess it's a copyright detection thing then.

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Just because it is widely used does not mean it's not a copyright violation. Someone took the photo, and they own the copyright to it. Unless you have an explicit license from that copyright holder, then most likely you are violating the copyright.

Additionally, you don't have a model release from the woman, and since you are using her image for commercial purposes, you could be liable and she would have a pretty good case, especially considering that it is a published fact that her image is more effective.

This image and content strikes me. I'm guessing that this woman, if she ever found out, could probably sue several of these advertisers for using her image without permission to sell a product. I think that many people forget that just because you found it, doesn't mean you can use it.

Your argument is that if dozens of people are doing it, it's probably ok, that's totally wrong.

I wonder where the image originated from, I would have guessed from a stock image library somewhere, but those kind of places tend to be very aggressive in tracking down unauthorized uses.

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Absolutely wrong. If you do not have a license to use the image or know for a fact that it is in the public domain, then it is a safe bet that you are in violation of the copyright. And just because you think you could reproduce the image does not give you the right to use it.

I see from a link via RiderOfGiraffes

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737491

that TinEye has been discussed here on HN plenty of times before. I have recently been using TinEye

http://www.tineye.com/

to trace the provenance of images I see on the Web. (I learned about TinEye, in fact, from an MIT alumnus who was wondering about whether a Facebook ad image was computer-generated or a photograph of an actual person. The image is a photograph of a famous model.) Whatever exactly it is that Facebook is doing to enforce its policies, it plainly has technical means for identifying images that duplicate other images, and then some set of policies for resolving doubts in doubtful cases into decisions about whether or not an advertiser can use a particular image. Just stay within the rules, and all should be okay.

Yep, TinEye was used here, as indicated in the comments over on the blog.

Didn't help for this particular person, and I got four emails this morning all claiming she was a different person.

It's a great tool. Highly recommended. Anybody posting images should use it.

The problem is what to do when you get a negative result. If Facebook wants to start requiring paperwork for every little 160 x 120 ad image that's fine with me: I'm a photographer and would love taking a weekend and shooting some stuff. But I'm not sure that a negative result on a Google or TinEye search is indicative that copyrights are being violated. If it is, there's a hell of a lot of material on the web (and Facebook) that needs to be removed. As indicated in the article, it's not whatever the rules are or aren't: it's the selective enforcement that can drive folks nuts.

> But I'm not sure that a negative result on a Google or TinEye search is indicative that copyrights are being violated.

Be sure. Since 1952 copyright has been assigned by default to the creator of the content, and unauthorized use is a violation of that right, except...

> If it is, there's a hell of a lot of material on the web (and Facebook) that needs to be removed.

...that it can be argued that much of the memeish usage of images falls within the "fair use" or "fair dealing" provisions of the laws. Using it in a commercial advertisement like you intended to does not and would be illegal.

EDIT: IANAL but I like to have some idea of the law before using other people's content.

I just want to be clear that this was a $5 experiment that I intended to share, post, and blog about for purposes of learning about Facebook advertising.

I'm not claiming fair use, simply saying that, for the amount of money involved, I was happy with doing as much diligence as I could and then be willing to remove the ad if it was in error. And as far as I know, copyright had nothing to do with the ad being rejected. My theory as expressed in the article was that it was the effectiveness of the picture, not copyright, that caused the problem. After all, I got the image from reading an article about posting ads on Facebook. In that article it showed several FB ads with this image on it. I thought that if the article was about posting ads, and this image was included, then there was some implied warranty. Like I said, I'm not trying to make excuses, simply explain. At the time I wasn't too terribly interested in the providence of the image, simply learning how all the pieces come together for an intended effect. Having said that, I'm perfectly happy with using the image in a blog article about the image itself -- if that's not fair use I don't know what is.

As of right this minute, none of us know who this person is or what kinds of protections are involved. Since I have received multiple claims to know who she is, and since they are all different people, I believe it is reasonable to expect that the image is of insufficient resolution as to be identifying of any one particular person. So -- unless something changes -- we can never really know, at least in the fashion you indicate. There is a huge amount of material on the web that falls into this area, and a lot of murky edge cases. For instance, FB thinks it is okay to post the same image on my website's fan page, even though FB runs ads on those pages? FB can use the image for it's commercial purposes but I can't use it for mine? All those "memeish of images" you refer to -- much of it on FB feeds -- isn't an issue for FB for purposes of placing their own ads?

There seems to be some serious inconsistencies here. I'm probably in error, so I apologize to whomever I might have offended. But I am not happy at all that I understand the current state of things to the degree necessary. I don't think anybody does -- I think at the end of the day it's a personal evaluation of risk. I'm also not happy that I wouldn't inadvertently do the same thing again -- that I'm not, in fact, doing it right now, by sharing funny pictures I find with my friends on FB.

That's really screwed up.

I could argue on and on about this -- but I have no desire to do so, or to use the image in an ad. I strongly feel that some folks would have taken that risk, and that it is a reasonable decision to make, and it bothers me that so many people would let their judgment of what's too much risk for them be the rule for everybody else.

>The problem is what to do when you get a negative result.

That's easy; if you don't know who made the image, then chances are you don't have the right to use that image. You find a new image that you do have rights to.

You don't assume that the image has no owner just because you can't find the owner.

So from what he's posted it appears that Mr. Markham thinks that ignorance of copyright status of an image means that he can do what he wants with it; when it actually means the complete opposite. That casts sufficient doubt on the actual reasons behind what he's writing about that the posts loses any value, except to promote his website. The title of this post even reads like a linkbait ad you'd see on Facebook; quite a turn-off.

I am pretty sure "famous grey shirt girl" is actually Jose Lima's wife.

http://digamma.net/btfwiki/Jose_Lima%27s_wife

That looks nothing like the "grey shirt girl" to me. There's more to a person than a large bosom and blonde hair, and actually even those 2 features of the two pictures look radically different.

But, I could very easily be wrong.

In case you're wondering what this has to do with the topic at hand: Jose Lima was a well-known baseball player who died last year. His wife became an internet meme before he died, but I'm guessing someone at facebook decided to use her image was likely a legal violation, not to mention in poor taste.

To me, what is a bit disheartening about all of this is that if you want to advertise to Facebook's massive user base, you have to play by Facebook's inconsistent rules and enforcement; there's not much of a way around it. And the system is not set up to help you succeed. It is instead set up to bend and morph in whatever way helps Facebook, no matter how positively/negatively it affects those actually purchasing the advertising and fueling the growth.

Of course it is within Facebook's rights to structure their platform as they see fit. It is just a bit sad that those services and brands with the largest power bases seem to throw their weight around in the most antagonistic ways imaginable.

It's hardly an inconsistent rule for them to say essentially "we know this isn't your image, use one you own".

Does facebook have any legal liability if their advertisers use copyrighted images?

Interesting point, I don't think anyone's actually tested it in court. For Facebook photo sharing where they're merely a hosting site FB probably has the DMCA protection, but for their Ad Network it's potentially more ambiguous.

Facebook's ad filtering is actually kinda retarded, and you're right: they definitely accept/reject based on advertiser size. I tried running a little ad using a picture of a pair of feet on a scale and it got the "doesn't meet the standards" message. However I see pictures like that all the time, with quite frankly little discernable difference except the name of the company running the ad. I'll have to try it and see if it gets through with a Facebook landing page.

Was the image your own, or did you copy it from somewhere? If you copied it from somewhere, what are the chances that it's a common enough image for FB to know you don't own the copyright?

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