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Comment by johnm212 | Hacker News Reader

It looks like facebook disputed this story

> Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, responded on Twitter on Wednesday saying the screenshots are from early March “when the ad account was briefly disabled for a few days due to an unrelated payments issue.”

> Osborne added: “The ads themselves were never rejected as they were never set by Signal to run. The ad account has been available since early March, and the ads that don’t violate our policies could have run since then.”

This is from: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh...

Either way, it's a great publicity stunt by Signal.

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I think it'd be helpful for discussion to include Signal's dispute of Facebook's disputation of the story in your comment:

> We absolutely did try to run these. The ads were rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as Facebook should know.

Are there other screenshots I'm not aware of that weren't posted on the Signal blog (as their response uses the plural)?

The only screenshot I can find shows a disabled account (not any rejected ads), and also seems to support Facebook's side of the story (you can see a banner in the background saying something about their "current balance", which would imply what Facebook said was true).

Facebook admits that they would have rejected a couple of the ads. See the grand-parents link.

Facebook claims it would have rejected ads that "assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation", which seems like a fair/reasonable policy to me, and accepted the others.

> Facebook claims it would have rejected ads that "assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation"

If I'm reading the picture correctly: Facebook collects and processes data about our medical conditions and sexual orientation. We've seen how FB allows ads targeting those metrics to be constructed - but FB also indicates it might get grumpy if those ads are posted.

Further, FB is not revealing who it makes that data available to or even explaining why it collect+processes our Med and SO data in the first place.

Does anything I've said here seem unlikely?

Your line of reasoning would make a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that Facebook (at least claims they) would allow the other ads.

It seems likely to me that rather than wanting to hide these specific categories (but be willing to expose every other type of data collection they do on you), that Facebook doesn't allow these specific two categories because of the significant negative social/legal consequences if they get them wrong.

They are very likely trying to avoid gay users getting an ad that says "You're straight, join my Straight only dating site" or an ad incorrectly diagnosing users with a disease they don't have.

To be clear, the "reasonable policy" is "don't let your ads reveal how invasive our spying is"?

The article cites Signal's response, but does not link to the tweet, that contains one additional screenshot: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1389732689096450048h (nothing new though)

You should record a loom and run the ads. Pretty hard to dispute hard video evidence.

Oh right, we should definitely expect to see more ads like this then... uh huh.

You can at the same time be against the ads and against misleading publicity stunts.

It isn't misleading though. It is exposing what really happens under the covers.

They didn't have to run the ads or even be truthful about being blocked. Fact is, they would have been blocked and the ads are indeed targeted. All of the details in those ads, are true.

Even if FB doesn't collect the data itself, any time you shop online, you get added to buckets and those buckets get shared when the seller uploads the target data back to FB and then the process starts all over again.

Why are you accepting Facebook's PR narrative as true?

From the article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh...):

> Signal countered on Twitter that it “absolutely did” try to run the ads. “The ads were rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as Facebook should know.”

I'm not saying Signal's side is necessarily true, but you're making an affirmative claim that Signal is performing a "misleading publicity stunt", by taking faith on Facebook's narrative as true.

*edit: posted the wrong link

History has shown me to expect that Facebook PR is actually more likely to be untrue than true.

But that started at the top.

https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-fac...

Great article. Thanks :)

Interestingly, there are a lot of ads that are like this… just subtler.

If you’ve ever seen tee shirts and similar products in ads that say things like “This Kansas City redhead likes their coffee with whiskey” or some other uncanny specific junk, thats how this works.

There is a whole new category of products based around these ads. I don’t know what they’re actually called actually, but it was on HN sometime in the last year. They’re usually tee-shirts and other “made on demand” products, and they use the magic of software to generate images for the ads, and products that produce to a ton of permutations, and target ad demographics that fit all of description. The products aren’t real until someone clicks the link, and then software knows which ad you clicked and generates it for that permutation.

The whole idea that the un-canny match will be enough to attract buyers for the novelty, and they eschew the inventory risk by just printing on demand.

I've got a bit of experience in this area.

I built an ad engine for Kink.com (NSFW) which had ads placed on even higher traffic sites like PH. I built the original pixel tracker for Marin Software, and @stickfigure and I built GearLaunch, which was the backend that sold those t-shirts you're talking about.

Needless to say, you don't see as many t-shirt ads any more because FB cracked down on it... not because of the targeted ads, but because it became a copyright infringement game and it was easy to block the people creating the ads (and shirts) as they were all outside of the US (ie: Vietnam). That and thankfully FB didn't want their wall to be all ads for t-shirts, lol.

“the ads that don’t violate our policies”

They would have denied the ads anyways. The cited FB spox is news not for adding facts but rather for its laden speciousness.

Are we really at the level of hate for Facebook/Meta where people are justifying just making stuff up about them?

"The accusations are untrue, but I think they would have been true, so that's basically the same thing."

Complain about these ads being banned when it actually happens, not when Signal lies about it because you think that's what Facebook would have done.

Why do you believe Signal is lying about it, and Facebook is not?

If Facebook was lying here, you'd think Signal would speak up about it. It would be a HUGE PR win for them, I can already imagine the headlines ("Facebook denied their ads, banned their account, and then lied to cover it up"). It would be extremely easy for them to provide a screenshot of an email from Facebook or similar saying the ad was declined, so why don't they?

Secondly, while I'm no fan of Meta/Facebook (and think they're a net negative for the world), I trust them way more than Signal to get basic facts right in their statement. Facebook is a massive corporation with lawyers and PR people who know that outright lying about something like this is a horrible and possibly illegal idea.

It seems pretty obvious to me here that Signal expected Facebook not to comment on this and for them to net a juicy PR win. On the other hand, Facebook has no reason to believe Signal would stay quiet after being accused of lying if they had a shred of evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately Signal achieved their goal anyways, because we still have people like choppaface coming out of the woodwork to defend them because "Facebook would have done it anyways".

Signal did speak up about it, and flatly denied Facebook's statement.

Signal provided no new evidence of this claim, and the existing evidence they did provide seems to support Facebook's side of the story (as I explained more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33900582).

I just don't see the motivation for Signal to hold back this evidence if what they're saying is true. It would be so easy for them to go and screenshot an email or page saying "this ad is rejected" - why don't they? The only way it makes sense is that they don't have this evidence, because they're lying.

They did speak out about it, which is in the same article linked above that sources the FB disputation statement (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh...):

> We absolutely did try to run these. The ads were rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as Facebook should know.

I don't think your logic about companies lying really tracks with the historical record. Companies, when they believe they can get away with it, lie all the time.

Again, I'm not saying that one organization was certainly lying or not-lying; I'm just challenging your presupposition that Signal was lying.

Copy pasting what I sent in another response:

> I'm just challenging your presupposition that Signal was lying.

I'm not presupposing anything, I'm looking at the available evidence and the actions of the actors involved and coming to a conclusion. If anything, I hate Meta/Facebook, I think they are a net negative to the world, and I probably came into this with a mental bias against them.

You're presupposing because you're coming to a conclusion that is not justified by the evidence.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

> The only way it makes sense is

I don't think you've provided convincing evidence of that.

Are the following all not possible?

1. They are unable to access that account or page any longer

2. Facebook chose to lie about this in a way that is not easily disproved by a screenshot.

3. Facebook disabled their account because of their ad content, but chose to put up a message that was more ambiguous.

*edit: formatting & make messaging more polite

> Are the following all not possible?

Correct, none of them are! When I last used Facebook advertising at a prior employer, they sent you an email when your ad was rejected informing you of this fact. Assuming that is still true (and I don't see any reason they would change this), then Signal should have undeniable proof about the claim that Facebook rejected their ads (which Facebook claims they did not do).

Of course, I strongly believe we will never see this evidence, because I think that Signal is lying and thus it doesn't exist.

The fact that Signal has not produced this evidence is strong evidence they are lying, because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from doing so. It would also be extremely weird for Facebook to lie about this, given they would know such evidence exists and Signal could easily disprove their lies.

How is the following not possible?

>Facebook disabled their account because of their ad content, but chose to put up a message that was more ambiguous.

We can fairly reasonably assume whoever is telling the truth is doing so about both things. Signal should know whether or not their payment details were actually having issues or not.

Now, if you want, you can believe that Signal is lying about whether or not the ads were rejected, wrote an extremely misleading blog post that strongly implies the suspension was permanent when it was temporary, but has correctly guessed that the real reason for the (temporary) suspension was their (unsubmitted) ads, and that they wrote this blog post rather than trying to submit their ads for the first time after being unsuspended.

But at that point, I would say that you are "presupposing because you're coming to a conclusion that is not justified by the evidence". You are so strongly biased that Facebook must 100% prove their innocence on every single point, but are just automatically assuming Signal is telling the truth with no evidence.

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