After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
jordan-shared.medium.com
jordan-shared.medium.com
Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it.
These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale, makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the population that will eat up any content at any quality level.
Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution, and they made a conscious business decision to not to engage with it's owners and operators because it will simply result in an exercise of splitting hairs and a reduction to the ridiculous. They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the level... and I don't blame them.
Also taking down personal accounts seems more like an automated action where a graph of related accounts are taken down.
They made a business decision to move on from this content platform. I love to hate on facebook with the best of them, but they really don't "owe" anyone anything.
There seems to be this pervasive attitude in technology circles that platforms "owe" other businesses and individuals something when they build businesses on top of said platforms. Just because you spent 54MM in ads on a platform doesn't entitle you to anything when a legal or business decision has to be made. Is it crappy not to communicate and give an explanation...? you bet it is. Did that 54MM in spend generate anything for Shared... you bet it did. Everyone was a winner until Facebook moved on.
I suspect that Facebook and Shared working to negotiate out of this will just result in a lot of spinning wheels, ammunition collection on both sides to pursue legal remedies, and nothing of real value changing. Facebook said we're moving on. Done.
1) I think it's very unhelpful to speak in terms of "not owing things" to people and defending anyone whoever does the absolute minimum until they're dragged kicking and screaming to extend the most basic courtesy. Part of being a decent human being is extending such basic courtesies to others even when there's no legal obligation to do so, and, when an org doesn't do that, it's absolutely right to call them out on it.
2) If you're right, that this only came after extensive negotiation in which FB did reveal their objections, then yes, it's fair to call the advertiser out on that, for misrepresenting what explanation FB gave him.
Edit: Also,
>With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't want to get into a long drawn out discussion with whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy.
That's not relevant, because FB can recognize when they're making a judgment call; my point was just that it's courteous to at least recognize when you're doing so.
?? I would expect to see $57,000 abbreviated as $57K.
You’re speaking with a pretty authoritative tone there as though you’re absolutely sure that Facebook has had a change of heart and only wants to host quality content, and there’s no other reason why the pages were removed. Do you have some sort of proof for that, or are you just speculating? If you’re speculating, don’t you think it would be a good idea to match the tone of your post to your true amount of confidence in what you’re saying, so as not to misinform people who might read your comment?
Facebook didn't decide anything as far as we know, he's presenting his opinions as facts, they aren't.
Used to be part of the guidelines. Seems as though they've removed it.
"Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution" - That is not stated as an implied opinion, it is stated as a fact with absolutely nothing to back it up. Certainly Facebook is just as filled with this kind of low-quality content today as it was yesterday or three months ago. There is just nothing to support your speculation that this is part of some movement by Facebook to improve quality of content.
I wish you were right, but I actually think most of the time the exact opposite is true: appearing highly-confident about speculative things makes someone seem more credible, rather than less.
The higher confidence you presented your wrong statement, the higher the hit to your credibility will be.
https://religiondispatches.org/a-year-after-the-non-apocalyp...
I suspect it has to do with the reddit / youtube generation becoming adults. Polite disagreement seems to be on the way out.
ie, I downvote things that I feel have an aggregate S/N degradation multiplier.
I kinda miss /.'s moderation qualifiers.
And some of the most disagreeable people on my social media are old farts, too :)
Instead of treating the comment section as a dumping ground for your purely speculative opinions masquerading as authoritative takes, and pushing the burden of nuance onto readers by asking them to downvote if they disagree, I think one should clearly state their opinions in an intellectually honest way. Then there is no need for downvoting if others disagree.
This was the realization that finally tipped me over into getting off Facebook.
I realized that every time I was posting pictures of my life to share with my friends, I was providing the bait that drew them in and forced them to watch ads and other drivel.
Therefore it makes them money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Curious conversation requires a certain lightness of touch. You can still make your same point that way; actually it will work better that way.
> You’re speaking with a pretty authoritative tone there as though you’re absolutely sure that Facebook has had a change of heart and only wants to host quality content, and there’s no other reason why the pages were removed. Do you have some sort of proof for that, or are you just speculating?
Isn’t in the HN guidelines to “respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize”?
An alternate hypothesis is that most of the spend referenced by OP is ancient and relevant only for old-time sake. Again. OP didn't say that exactly, but it's a fair thing to question based on how the OP wrote the posting and selected the relevant time period.
IMO, this should be part of the HN guidelines. HN would certainly be a better place if everyone followed this rule.
Isn't that a slippery slope? In my country, Facebook decided not to ban some right-wing posters for hate speech because the right-wing in power had managed to get one of their OWN into Facebook, who "advised" Facebook that fighting hate-speech from such people would adversely affect Facebook operation in India as the government in power won't be happy about it. This person also got Facebook to take down opposition ads during the elections, thus harming their electoral prospects.
Source: Facebook and Narendra Modi: How FB’s policy head in India allowed a BJP politician to spread hate online so that it would not hurt its “business prospects” - https://churumuri.blog/2020/08/15/facebook-and-narendra-modi...
> They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the level... and I don't blame them.
Without being familiar with Shared, I'm willing to take you at your word on the company. I do question your conclusion though. I've seen no indications that Facebook has any standards and if anything they seem to promote crap content not bury it. If it drives engagement and doesn't bring legal trouble to their doorstep, Facebook seems to be all over it.
Which makes me think there is something else going on here.
Almost 80% of the ads I see on Facebook are of similar quality. If they're trying to reduce low quality content on their platform, than they should just say that.
I am afraid you failed to read the fine print ;) I think the average legalese boilerplate is along the following lines: All characters and events depicted in this film are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All "episodes of Galaxy Quest are true historical documentaries".
Classic.
If you hate the people, that’s not the reason you tell them. You tell them you don’t have sufficient resource to provide the level of support you would want to put on the project, or that you don’t feel you can be price/quality competitive because of some factor and don’t think you are a good fit compared to your competitors.
I would never tell a client that their website “doesn’t meet our quality bar” - that’s basically saying “we are too good for you” and I would personally think it’s incredibly condescending - just look at Berkshire Hathaways website!
I sense a need for a new Ralph Nader, someone who has the clout to take on these companies and put them in their place. That place is not in the halls of power, it is not at the dining table of lawmakers, in the ear of regulators. Their place is on the market where they are to compete with other companies, where developers and users use their power of choice to keep them from attaining too much power as they currently clearly have.
Ans: I can't pay for the $2M house I bought in Noe Valley on a normal salary.
> Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution
Facebook's entire business model is built around the proliferation of "crap" content.
They made that conscious decision after running away with the money.
After the first few mil wouldn’t you understand your partner a little better?
At 57 it’s a rocky divorce and you know full well who you were sleeping with.
At least that's how I understand what happened.
How do you know that?
(I suspect you are right though, and this is more likely to be a “hot or not” type arbitrary decision from a management team developed around superficial face value judgements and zero empathy... Apple ended up with a “Jobs culture”, Facebook reflects Zuckerberg...)
They even give them a reason. How is:
>they kicked me and my pages off without warning or explanation
truthful?
The only message that I can find which might qualify is, *“Due to repeated Page violations, you can’t post to any Pages eligible for monetization.”
That doesn't explain what the violations might have been. And in the dashboard where they were supposed to see said violations, no pages were marked as having any violations.
Which boils down to, "Due to repeated violations that we won't tell you about..."
Yeah, in their position I wouldn't consider that an explanation either.
Facebook are, of course, not a publisher, yet they are now the editor?
Sounds to me they are whatever they want to be, depending on the audience.
Kind of genius, in a way.
I guess they do click scams via bots too?
I wish there was a global tracker for services that make money through ads, that reported the percent of ads that are for other services in the same category. All that data is secret though, probably.
10 years ago, that kind of site was called a "content farm". I don't hear that term used much lately. Google spent a lot of effort peeling dreck like that off of their search results with limited success. Facebook, it seems, has had use for them until recently.
The OP/CEO seems comes off as utterly delusional when he says... > "Until recently, we had more than 25 million enthusiastic fans on 11 pages."
Yeah, right, "enthusiastic" if he really means getting them to click on stuff by exploiting subconscious glitches in the human basal ganglia overriding cognition.
Facebook + Shared.com must have been good while it lasted, at their users' expense, but f them both.
If your ISP decides to pull out of your area and sends you a notice that your account will be closed at the end of the month, would you expect to be reimbursed for the years of service you paid for?
Isn't that essentially FB's goal too? Albeit crap content that hits your brain's pleasure center
I still see lots of these types of ads on Facebook, just from different publishers. Are they broadly going after it?
They must have pissed off Zuck some other way because I don't think that he cares about that.
If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few truly giant companies.
There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory
Penn State has its own data-centers, is part of the Internet2 consortium and has dedicated fiber to both AWS and Azure but you're still ultimately reliant on those you're leasing the connections from - even if you own the fiber, you're probably leasing the right-of-way/poles/etc.
So ... how do we build an Internet that's fully inter-connected but can withstand actions by the few relatively large carriers? Thinking about it a bit more, isn't the effect of having a few large network providers analogous to the issue with BitCoin having a few large mining operations in effective control of the ecosystem?
EDIT: This was posted on today's "Who is hiring?" thread - not really p2p Internet but ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633106
Problem is, people expect streaming video on their smartphones. You can't do that over low bandwidth over the horizon links.
Continent scale? Depends on the continent. No way to do that in the Americas, there's just too much open space. You could do it in many cities I do think.
If you're in the position to lease a connection to an internet exchange, you've got tons of options for transit from there. And leasing fiber is generally a matter of location and cost, not content; I don't know if it's strictly common carrier, but it might be.
Going multi-platform from the start is probably not the way to go as you are adding complication before you have the basics rounded out, but once you are spending that much on advertising you presumably have a sizable turn-over and should have long ago looked at diversifying to deal with situations like this which (even if temporary) could kill the business model.
Of course if FB is truly the only game in town for your target audience, you have a problem there...
It led to some quirkiness: we had to disavow ourselves of almost all cloud services. They wanted all the software and data on-prem because they didn't want anything on U.S. soil.
There are a couple authoritarian states that have fully-owned state enterprises that people might also argue are one-in-the-same.
It would be like looking at how much a small business fabricator spent on metal and other supplies. That number is going to be larger than what they actually bring in as profit. If ads aren't your supplies then it would absolutely be an indication of being a large business if you spent $57 million on marketing.
I was surprised by this definition too.
But w.r.t. the amounts of money, they spent $57MM over 15 years, so it's $4MM/y using very rough math.
Upd: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Standards... says on p. 29 that it's less than $27.5MM or 1000 people, so you are right, it's quite a high bar.
Upd2: EU caps small businesses at 50 people and medium at 250, which sounds much more reasonable to me https://www.ucl.ac.uk/procurement/suppliers/smes#:~:text=Def....
But I'm sure they wouldn't have spent $57M if they hadn't extracted more than that from other advertising parties.
I also don't see how shared.com is any different than buzzfeed.com. Is the deciding factor the number of things listed in an article? Like whether the list is of 8 things or of 38 things? What's the difference between those two sites?
My thoughts exactly. Not necessarily agreeing with FB's act here, but this post and the way they connect their issue to a hot topic these days (small businesses) seems hypocritical and an attempt to make people sympathize with them. That's not what's happening here. They should instead talk about the entirety of their business (all their pages, not just a handful) and then claim it is a small business.
Best you'll manage along those lines is approaching celebrities and youtube/insta stars and getting them to endorse your product.
Things change, and Facebook and Google are now the big players in online advertising, accounting for a large majority of the ad market. Other platforms exist, of course, but by cutting out Google Ads and Facebook you're going to be targetting a very different user base and are cutting out a significant share of the market.
Perhaps it can evolve into a class action lawsuit. That would teach FB and other FAANGs.
Lawyering up has zero chance.
Then the fact that they hold Safari backwards to cripple the adoption of PWA's (Modern Web Apps). They don't allow real competitors to Safari either. The competitors that exist like Chrome or Firefox are just Safari under the hood on iOS.
iOS and Apple have single handedly crippled the innovation on mobile web. Safari is the modern Internet Explorer but Apple forcing people to use it directly or indirectly and not allowing real competition on iOS.
This is straight up anti trust material and they should face scrutiny for it. Sleepy lawmakers should wake up.
Not only does it harm American businesses, but also businesses across the world.
Basic legislation guaranteeing certain freedoms for the consumers costs Apple and Google et al. nothing but massively empowers consumers in a sector where information about the products is largely controlled by the creators of said products.
This also prevents products becoming e-waste when the company is done supporting them.
Even with ePubs book publishers are likely to take 50—75%. Print books the publishers still take 85% and higher.
Now that is a tax. But I would not call it collusion.
Then Apple decided to cut it out. And also cripple web apps so they can't even be alternatives properly. Can you build a Mail app on the web? No. Apple didn't add the required features to Safari that developers could build on top of. And Chrome/Firefox/Edge did add them and they work. However on iOS, Apple does not allow them, instead they're forced to use Safari under the hood with Chrome/Google branding sprinkled on top.
Tell me how much publishers pay to distribute on Windows from their websites? Or the WebApps that don't need to be installed? Apple provides little value as a middle man.
The just wanted to be parasite middlemen and they don't deserve to be. They're the mafia.
Go for them under anti-competition clauses. And if there is indication that they have colluded, start trust busting on both. Google is already not trustworthy. They colluded with Facebook already. And Apple colluded to lower wages with other tech companies.
It is entirely reasonable to think that this is anti-competitive and hinders innovation.
Even today, it’s likely they don’t make much on those 99 cent purchases, last I looked transaction costs were probably over 10%.
There are many things I like about Android, but most of them are philosophical.
I find navigating it atrocious and I have spent quite a bit time reverse engineering some applications.
Again, this is the competitor to apple? How much does each market capture. I suspect apple is doing much better here.
I specifically remember submitting an app, and getting denied. The response we got was relatively vague, saying it was breaking ToS. No screenshots, no call or anything of the sort.
This was the first submission though.
That is just a guess.
What I do think is on FB's agenda is producing and profiting off of low-quality clickbait directly. Thus, someone at FB could have decided the OP's business is competing with them. Even if you don't agree that FB is all about low-quality clickbait right now, it shouldn't shock anyone that FB might decide to get into that market and take steps to squash a potential competitor.
So presumably facebook is miffed that it pays better to take eyeballs away from their feed and point them at google ads.
It does make one wonder why FB doesn't stick adsense on the feed or increase the price of their ads; clearly there's plenty of room for arbitrage.
Could you tell me more about that? What new policy?
Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of governments over moderating the content which is posted on their platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook started to weed those "bad" actors out in the moment of heat. I'm not implying that this is the case for sure, but it's not entirely impossible to imagine. Perhaps it's good that when governments take action and put pressure on FAANGs that they are even prepared to cancel a 57M customer if that means staying in business for themselves.
They probably tripped some algorithm.
This happened last year to podcast-addict (one of the most popular applications in Google's Android store) [1]. The lesson I take away is: even big players spending millions are subject to the algorithm.
But of course these cases remain a minority or else Facebook would already be bankrupt. That's why the majority will call these people whiners, probably guilty, and so on.
Basically, what Facebook is doing is automatized slander. You've violated some policy but we don't tell you which one. You've been caught in "suspicious behavior" (an actual term used by them) but we don't tell you what we mean by that. You've tried to circumvent our policies - or maybe you haven't, just beg us to give you another chance.
Let's just say it's not fun having to deal with this, and no company should rely much on Facebook ads.
I see this as a good sign. I haven't used Facebook in over 6 years and don't intend to. Everything Facebook is piholed on my network. But I'm glad they're starting to kick out trash content producers.
And yeah, like others have said, if you spend ~$60M on Facebook ads (among others), I don't think you can call yourself a small business. This is like those 6 year old companies that still consider themselves startups.
If you make enough revenue from content farms to spend that much on ads AND getting kicked off of Facebook jeopardizes your "business" that much, I'm gonna assume you engage in some dark patterns to collect/sell data of your visitors, or to place ads in shady ways, or some form of SEO pollution. At the very least, you run native ads disguised as content. I wouldn't want to have any business with you either.
This is a reminder Facebook is too powerful.
Also a reminder not to base your business on a functionality of a monster.
If there is no customer support, there is no reliability, period. You can delude yourself into thinking you have a resource, when what you have is a niche in somebody else's place.
Of course this will throw his business into chaos.
Time to sue Facebook for unfair business practices. Or if that's not allowed under the TOS, walk away and find the next path.
Every story I hear paints another stroke of the picture of Facebook turning into a cesspool of AI-controlled careless swamp of attention-grabbing, only mitigated by reporting on their most callous bullshit.
HN deserves better than sweeping generalisations and shallow black and white polemics.
They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly?
I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep / account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.
> I have visited their offices and have hosted their representatives at mine. I still cherish my relationships with all of them.
> Over the past few years, however, the lines of communication have gone dark. Instead of our trusted Facebook partners, we found ourselves trying to communicate with 3rd party contractors who didn’t always share our goals and objectives or understand our business. There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them.
If they could work out something with the customer representatives to mostly keep doing what they want to do while fitting within the letter of the policy, that would just indicate a bug in the policy text that needs to be fixed.
Two sentences later it becomes clearly that those contacts have left or whatever and they have been since dealing with whoever was not really involved with Facebook.
I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTube where even fairly large channels acting in good faith can run in to problems. I don't think there's any malice involved, but it's just too much effort to fix, there are other things going on, and they've got enough money anyway: so why bother?
Even just a few years ago, Facebook's revenue was a lot smaller, so that would explain why they were more outgoing at the time.
FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue.
I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be considered by many people / relatively highly ranked employee.
(At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete 1/10000 of my global revenues...)
And there are probably other factors as well, such as poor internal communication, algorithms making poor decisions, and more. But those are all solvable problems and I suspect that "meh whatever"-attitude plays a fairly large role in them not getting fixed at various levels. I mean, if my company left 330k/month on the table then I'd run after that faster than Usain Bolt. But do you think Zuckerberg or other top-level managers at Facebook will?
But I have no insight in any of this, so I'm just guessing really...
I have very little sympathy for companies that run ads in the first place. This just seems like good news to me.
Maybe facebook changed their ad policies to prohibit this kind of content. That's within their right but they owe an explanation to their advertisers and perhaps some wind-down time.
This sort of arbitrary ban-by-T&C, with no judicial oversight, is further evidence that Facebook, and likely all large tech companies, are abusing their monopoly power and need significantly more regulation.
cbd site:shared.com
>Our legacy promotional business, Freebies (freebies.com, free.ca), publishes notices of free samples, savings and coupons from great brands. The majority of our expenditure on Facebook is through Freebies.
Translation: Promoted marketing content and clickbait sites of very little actual content value. I'm absolutely unsurprised FB banned them.
It is hard being wholly dependent on a large company (Google, Facebook, etc.), but not much choice you have either when riding that wave on their product.
Regardless of if the overall decision is good or bad, how FB goes about it, including messaging and forewarning is something that there is no excuse to not get right.
Saying look at our ToS is absurd.
Lumping in conspiracy theorists with pedophiles? This guy is an ass, his business was probably barely legitimate, and I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest.
Yah, it's those conspiracy theorists that are the worst in society.
But still that quoted sentence is quite weird. Banning someone from an online platform is the standard procedure for policy violations, not just for the "worst in our society" no matter how you define those.
Now to kick my HN habit...
In my experience, a message sent to the appropiate FB group can outperform by a factor of 10 facebok ads. Not just clickthroughs, but also repeated visits after 2 weeks.
If you buy traffic from a specific country, they will send you from whenever else* while they charge you for geolocated traffic. Sad thing IP addresses are easy to geolocate this days and they miserably fail to do it.
I wonder how they work with stuff you cannot compare like similar audiences..
Facebook is know to do or say whatever is needed to further their business. It not a new thing, it is a pattern of deception well documented here on HN.
By choosing to build your business on FB platform you should have understanding, that you are not really building your own business but rather you are building business for FB which lets you build business on their platform until such time they decide it is not worth it and kick you out.
You chose an ally that has no morals and you let yourself be completely dependent on their willingness to keep you.
Every business owner is responsible for thinking for themselves and investigating their partners. If this was your only partner, on which you were completely reliant for your business, it means you have catastrophically neglected your responsibility. Have you done your job you would realize that there is a risk and you would try to save or diversify in case the worst comes. Instead you were just focused on reaping benefits rather than thinking long term.
Pass the message to other people as widely as possible so that public is aware of how FB conducts business so that less people will face the same tragedy in the future.
I.e., being shunned by Facebook or Google is a high-consequence, low-probability, hard-to-predict event.
You may as well treat it like building a factory in an earthquake zone.
Step 2: Take out $10 Million Policy
Step 3: Have your buddy at facebook flag your content
Step 4: Split money with buddy from facebook
If your business is dependent on FB, time to pivot. Q. E. D.
This guy or someone in his business or personal circle has caused problems for someone and they've leant on him.
Around 20% of all deplatforming originates with these covert coerce requests from states or big corporate
15 years ago or so I happened to become a moderator on forum for script kiddies. I had been a temporal appointment for a month, because of another anecdotal funny story, but what I've found while being a moderator, that all those script kiddies trying to sell some stolen data were open for a discussion of their behaviour. In a good way open.
Before me (and by the way after me, and even with me) the forum was a mess. A great heap of kids trying to outcry others with their offers to find a buyer for their crap. There were strictly sounding rules, like "do not post into your forum topic (to get it on top of others) more than once per day", which were violated frequently. The approach of a moderator before me was to temporarily ban anyone he caught crossing the line.
I was the reason of my temporary assignment to this forum, and I tried to do the best I could. So I started to take notes, and I talked to people, explaining them what they did wrong, and what consequences they would face when I'll run out of time to talk with them. It worked like a charm, they were ready to conform to the rules, conditionally on the rules for everyone not just them. I used banning as a way to affect behaviour, but mostly short-term bans, no more than a day long, just to make sure they noticed me and to give them a feeling that they were punished enough and all their guilt is in the past redeemed and forgotten. (The guy before me could kind of dug up some half-a-year old violation and use it as an official reason for ban, while the real reason was violation of a pecking order, with him on the top).
I had learned a lot from that. From the other hand I have been never worked for 12+ hours a day for a month without days off. It was exhausting. If I had some tools for automation it would be easier, but I never got time to write the tools I needed.
I know that Facebook is a lot of orders of magnitude bigger then my problem was, so I'd likely be mistaken if tried to extrapolate, but nevertheless, my guess is Facebook have run out of resources to manage that mess and is trying to shrink it.
That said, I don't know of many "small businesses" that can pull $52m in ad spend, even if it's over 20 years ;)
Facebook has been happy to take their money all these years, now all of a sudden they are bad guys.
At the very least Facebook owes them a better explanation.
Facebook's cash flow is enough that even this company's revenue is a rounding error on _weekly_ numbers.
In other words, FB don't care, don't let the door hit you.
If some player has a few billion in FB revenue at stake, I'll bet they can at least reach a first tier CSR.
If they were an actual business partner, you could rely on the terms of the contract the two of you arrived at to define your partnership to give you recourse, assuming your lawyers were competent.
I hope he at least gets some explanation, but this goes to show there's no substitute for forging a trench of independence around your business model (at least where it makes sense) and growing your own ecosystem (certainly not an easy task, of course).
I don't know if Facebook is right or wrong here but the big internet companies are big enough now that they need an independent review board for cases like this. Yet, we hear rumblings of it happening but it has not. I wonder what it will take for that to happen?
A vast amount of free samples are actually review scams. You buy the thing from Amazon, they refund you so you appear as a verified purchase and then you write a 'honest' review. I regularly report these when I see them, I presume others too, if they got involved in this sort of thing, then a ban is right.
Given how much you have to spend on Facebook ads to still generate views. I wont be losing sleep over it.
Maybe its a sign to move on to more productive things.
Assuming a Zipf distribution for their clients spending, it easily place them in the top 1000 biggest spenders.
I wouldn't call it small.
Assuming an even distribution over 14 years, for FB today, spending 300k a month might warrant a rep but it's at the very bottom of tiered spend.
As someone who has never had a facebook account, I am more confused than ever about why people want anything to do with it.
In this particular case I strongly believe the platform developed was competing with Facebook and it may be the cause Facebook shut it down.
It is my personal opinion however and may be not true.
But all of my experience and knowledge tells me so.
There might be that public pressure will force Facebook to reenable the business and I hope it will happen.
However there are a lot of businesses that was shut down and died because there they wasn't able to put a pressure on Facebook.
It is the main reason why Facebook in particular should be prevented from making more harm, and we should all do everything what is possible to not be dependant on 3rd party companies.
By all means, take advantage of FB, but prepare for the day it ends.
Facebook is the place where some of my "acquaintances" learned that Bill Gates gives them COVID, that everything is a conspiracy designed to take something from them, that the vaccine will implant them nano-chips or 5G "reactions" and sleeper nano-whatever that will wake-up on the right frequency.
I hate that platform because it gives a big mouth to everyone, to the bad apple that can now infect the rest over the internet. One look at shared.com homepage and I knew...I couldn't be bothered with their story.
Absolutely deserved. I hope others use this as an opportunity to learn and not make the same mistake.
(completely ignoring ads being a shady business anyways)
The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook.
The content is up, go read. Shared.com, fun.shared.com, see if you would ever want their headlines in your news feed.
If the content doesn't violate any rules and people want to read it, then it has a place. If it does violate rules, then communicate those clearly. Given that, I think that this is most likely not an issue of rules violation but of Facebook not wanting the content on their platform (and not wanting to actually justify that).
>>In total, several pages that had 21 million fans had been unpublished, and Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists.
Er, no. Just be slightly more right-wing that the current Facebook overton window and you'll get banned.
Perhaps Facebook is trying to raise the "quality" of what is shared on their platform (not just the ethics), but if that is the case I haven't heard anything about it. Facebook is absolutely stuffed to the gills with this kind of commodity-grade filler content.
Based on what he posted, my guess is that the author delegated too much editorial control in his mini media empire and one of the sites in his network published some pretty objectionable content. If I were a betting man, I'd say it was COVID/vaccine related.
I'd suggest it's much more likely that they tripped some automated spam protection or a moderator thought they looked suspicious, than there's a conspiracy against the company by a competitor.
That conspiracy would be of a high reputational risk to Facebook and the competitor, and would have a paper-trail in contracts that guarantee Facebook that ad revenue for the deplatforming.
It seems highly unlikely to me, as much as I believe Facebook to have poor moral standing.
Isn't this the explanation? I get that they disagree with the substance of the violations, but it doesn't sound like this came out of nowhere like the headline claims. They were repeatedly flagged for ad violations, then their pages were shut down when they ignored these as the "cost of doing business".
Err, how is that an explanation? If they don't run dating ads and Facebook says their dating ads are non-compliant, it's a non-answer. It'd be like me firing you for having blue hair when you don't have blue hair.
Maybe they're right about FB incorrectly flagging their ads, I'm not in a position to judge. However, they're making a misleading claim by saying this happened without explanation and leading with the image showing no Page Quality violations, since the affiliated Freebies page did apparently have numerous violations.