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Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

A pretty cool piece.

Too bad they have to use text to make their point. It would essentially reach zero people due to rules (https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/how-to-adher...). Then there's personal attributes (https://m.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/perso...). Then ads that do not sell products/services follow murky rules, and talking about Facebook itself is usually prohibited. (edited from: because the rule they're actually breaking is the "No Text" rule in Facebook ad creatives.)

Is there non-symbolic imagery that they could have used to say the same thing?

Perhaps they should have retained someone with this kind of creative experience.

Looking critically, the most narrow and serious obstacle to advocate for privacy is storytelling.

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> "No Text" rule in Facebook ad creatives.

Where can this rule be found? That seems like a really odd rule, and https://www.facebook.com/business/help/388369961318508?id=12... says the opposite:

"Avoid too much text on the image itself. We've found that images with less than 20% text perform better, though there is no limit on the amount of text that can exist in your ad image."

The story goes that one of the founders hated text in ads, and decreed that it should be banned.

They later converted text in ads into a penalty, so you pay more (as an advertiser) for it.

FB uses a rather obscure and proprietary internal scoring system. You may be able to publish an ad campaign with lots of text once or twice, but it will make your ads account score go down and at some point it will likely be disabled - temporarily first, after one or two more incidents forever.

The recommended amount of text on the image is less than 20%. Their system also doesn't like text because of potential "circumventions of policy" with putting text in images. Weird fonts that are not machine-readable will likely get the account banned fast.

Do you have a source for this? I find it very hard to believe considering it's in conflict with the explicit unambiguous wording in their policy.

This actually matches with my experience. My product is text-related and I ran a couple ads with allowable amounts of text (back when there were limits). The ads performed just fine, but FB decided to stop running them, claiming they were low-quality.

I'm so glad they changed this rule from a blanket prohibition, since it precluded my company from effectively advertising on FB. We have developed a novel way to display text on screen that makes it easier and faster to read, and improves accessibility for people with dyslexia and ADHD.

With a screenshot of text, it's super easy to understand how our tech works and whether it is useful for a particular person. But FB wouldn't let us boost posts that had images of our product in use.

I'd be curious to hear from others how much FB penalizes advertisers in terms of cost/reach if they have lots of text.

The policy recently changed and now officially allowable. They used to even have a tool to test the old 20% rule [1]

But still their algo doesn't promote heavy text as much. It's a black box; ads aren't as simple as highest bidder, FB takes engagement on a per user basis into account and evidently heavy text lowers.

Which is ironic given they added those text only posts & the takeover of Memes which at least for me drove my personal browsing to IG only. And now that's starting to go the same way. maybe meme-ification is humanly inherent lol. I'm starting to unfollow friends who only post those inspirational memes and crap. I just want photos, inspiring content from creators/athletes that are relevant to me, and family updates.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/980593475366490?id=12...

This actually violates the “personal attributes” rule. In my experience, this rule is enforced quite strictly — although you can still see the same targeting criteria under the “why did I see this ad” feature.

https://m.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/perso...

This rule reads as “don’t tell the target about our assumptions of them”. Isn’t that kind of the point of Signals post?

I'm assuming the rule is around because FB knows it's targeting isn't 100% accurate and it might ruffle feathers if an ad claims you're something you're not. I don't see that specifically as nefarious.

Especially because FB tells me why I am being shown an ad already.

In the early days of COVID I was curious what the difference between types of viruses. e.g. how herpes and HIV hides in cells compared to viruses like influenza and SARS-CoV-2.

One of those sites clearly had Facebook integration because now Facebook is sure that I'm an HIV-positive gay man, with ads that correspond. It is one thing to get the ads but it would be a bit more overt if there was a text ad declaring that I was an HIV positive gay man.

People take offense at being told that there’s a machine labeling them, and would demand the right to revise or remove the machine-assigned labels. Facebook prevents that outcome by preventing disclosure of targeting characteristics.

See also this Show HN from /new for purging your complete set of labels, and ask why Facebook doesn’t build this into the site UI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27045374

(The link is broken, but apparently there's a page you can single-remove specific interests from, if you can find it.)

Wow, that item link points to a literally blank page. The site template is there but there isn't even a title header.

Sadly even the web archive's copy of the page has the empty version :(

Yes it is. Signals ads might still get approved if they took out the 'you' voice. But that dilutes the awareness they are bringing.

They could just turn it into questions ("Are you...?")

The rule doesn't exists anymore. Ads with a lot of text simply get penalized when it comes to distribution.

> because the rule they're actually breaking is the "No Text" rule in Facebook ad creatives

maybe breaking the rule was intentional, to make this article work

I don't think the point here was to actually run these ads. They don't look like they'd drive a lot of conversion, and there's a big risk that quite a few would actually be inaccurate in practice - Facebook's algorithms, while they know a lot about you, can also be quite wrong.

But you can't see that in an article like this, and it's far more likely to reach the right people.

The no text rule has not been enforced to disable an adaccount for years now. It merely de-ranks you. Source: Worked in advertising.

Though you can't have text in the image, you could put the target filters as the post's text and use the image to grab the attention.

Signal should sell this exact design on a targeted t-shirt and then advertise that.

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