Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

AIs and other opaque processes making decisions are incredibly frustrating. I'm still wondering why my tea-of-the-month business [0] got turned down by Stripe when I incorporated an LLC (technically a Godo Kaisha, as it is incorporated in Japan).

It came as a surprise as it was perfectly fine by them for as long as it was a sole proprietorship. Which is why I strongly suspect the rejection came from an AI. At the time of rejection we were still using the Stripe account of the sole proprietorship, and surely a human would have noticed and blocked that account if it was actually running against Stripe ToS!?!

It doesn't make any sense to me. In any case, I know that financial regulations are stringent and payment providers are often required to leave us in the dark. But is it frustrating...

Now I'm stuck with PayPal for the time being. Unless they, too, decide that selling green tea is against their ToS.

By the way, does anyone know if it's ok to re-attempt to open an account with Stripe? Our offering has been evolving, so we might very well be within their ToS now?

[0] https://tomotcha.com

EDIT: wording

What I find most frustrating about this is that they straight up lie to you. They don't actually review your account and the ban isn't permanent. The minute people in this situation get through to a human (one with any autonomy, anyway) the ban gets reversed. So it's all about the cost and efficiency and convenience for Facebook/Meta.

I definitely think there need to be laws made about this. Because it's really clear that the market has no power to correct this behaviour - yet it can be utterly devastating to individuals when they have life long bans put in place on what are (whether you like it or not) pretty much essential online services.

Other similar cases I'm aware of.

* The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.

* Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns).

* People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran").

* Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.

Alexa not being able to say "pussycat" properly, which is an issue to this day.

* Parental control software that filtered on "anal" in URLs, which also affected "analysis".

* Another parental control software that removed any file with "sex" in the name. This also included "sysext". I know of a school whose entire computer room got bricked because of that bug, the IT person decided it would be a good idea to update all the computers to Windows 10 at once, without checking for software incompatibilities first.

* The British politician Dominic Cummings not being able to set up a Twitter account.

I've multiple times tried to open a seller account on Ebay. Two minutes after the account was created and confirmed it got blocked due to me having violated their terms of services. At this point I had not done ANYTHING with the account yet, not even putting in a profile picture.

And the rest went the same as with you: Appeal process is done by a bot who only knows one answer: "We are right, you violated our ToS, your account is blocked, this decision is final".

Oh how I miss the times when an organization for which you potentially are making a lot of money was still willing to hire a human for customer support...

And of course in these days, where your whole business may depend on being able to advertise or sell on the small number of platforms, a bot may decide to kill my business and company at any time. It's scary.

I'm banned for life from all Facebook properties (except for WhatsApp) because of my surname. They believe it's fake (or too controversial) and a copy of my passport hasn't changed their minds.

I used to have a Facebook account ~13 years ago before their real name policy came into force, but I closed it because I found it awkward to refuse or accept so many contact requests by people from my distant past.

Now unfortunately I can't access the Facebook group that is the only source of information for important things going on in the building I live in. My wife does have access though, so it's not a big deal.

It seems the only way for me to get around Facebook's real name policy is to use a fake name. But I guess that wouldn't allow me to advertise on Facebook or use any of their developer related stuff.

> Meta won’t be seeing any of my money, whereas companies like Google, who seem to employ at least some humans in their advertising department — will

That is a convoluted way to say you'll do business with companies that accept your business. Google is known for fully automated bans on your full account, not just the advertising part.

I've had similar problems with Fabebook/Meta before and eventually gave up on buying ad services from them.

One solution to this problem would be a law that 1. mandates to give users the information when they are dealing with an algorithm only, and 2. forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame. I very much hope at least the EU will enact such a law soon.

Apart from monumental wastes of time with AI interactions for which no one is compensated, the thing that worries me most is that either AI "customer support" cannot do anything of substance anyway or the AI is given the power to make substantial changes to user settings, billing, etc. The first option means the company is bullshitting their customers, the second option can have very undesirable consequences.

Extrapolate this type of "unfortunate incident" to medicine, finance, insurance, policing, education, corporate hiring etc. where automation and "AI" is supposed to slash costs and improve efficiency and ponder what kind of society we are heading towards and why.

There is nothing wrong with using technology to empower humans (in this case Meta employees) to be more efficient in processing information. But removing the human from the loop in matters that affect other humans (whether in small or major ways) is a disastrous direction.

Coincidentally on the frontpage of the Financial Times today: "Meta’s Yann LeCun argues against premature AI regulation".

Welcome to the future. Before too long this kind of bs will be an almost daily occurrence for most people who have to interact with businesses/institutions on the net. Highly automated inscrutable processes with hairtrigger banning logic and review paths that never lead to a human. Because the humans that survived the automation are too busy feeding the Algorithm to ever interact with the customers.

I suspect the only solution for these cases is some form of small claims court / independent arbitration process (and not just for Meta, but for all of the FAANG bunch and their like).

Can you imagine a big tech employee having to say to a judicial person, "The system automatically blocked the user, then automatically denied their appeal, and we have no way to know why, because there is no evidence or other supporting data because we deleted it all."

Surely any form of arbitration or legal scrutiny would turn that into an instant default judgement against the tech giant?

And while I would generally support the right of any business to choose who to do business with, there comes a point when a business becomes somewhat monopolistic, and a gatekeeper of access to the market, at which point these kinds of decisions need to have a reasonable route of appeal.

It remains to be seen if the behaviour of these companies will change in response to legislation, for example the EU Digital Markets Act has some obligations relating to "Allowing business users to access end users" that may be relevant.

This isn't just bad AI or ML.

It's just straight up bad product management and development. Some small group of people decided to make this the behavior and implement it.

Don't attribute to machines that which was clearly malice, ignorance, or apathy (or all of the above) by the builders.

Just one more data point to add. I manage a business with 50 physical locations in a Nordic country in Google. These are the business locations that appear in Google Maps. I constantly have similar issues to get our Google Business profiles approved due to "Live animals". It's a simple word filter they just cannot get fixed. It's a constant headache. I get it fixed every time by requesting a manual review. It's work for me and work for them.

I've noticed that Meta offers much better support than Google. They have excellent tech support, at least for higher ad spend tiers. I feel like talking to a human, who seems to care. I think they assign us based on ad spend to more knowledgeable teams. From Google I've never heard a peep from a competent person.

In opposition to what the author thinks, I do think that the appeal was viewed by a human (probably from an outsourced agency somewhere far away) who simply didn't have 1) the capacity to understand what the author is selling 2) time enough to read the appeal, research and understand the problem and 3) possibly sufficient control over the English language

Just create a new account and advertise with that. Or even a fake account. I know a lot of people who have dozens of fake accounts even for legitimate products and ads. Facebook is notorious for not providing any kind of support for its ad platform. Not to mention that they don't seem to do anything to stop fraudulent traffic.

I suppose there's a certain irony in an AI system not knowing what Python is.

It would be even more ironic if it was Python code that made the decision.

This feels the same like google blocking me from using adwords; it said we definitely violated something they didn't specify and were banned for life. We sold productivity desktop software b2b. Not porn or animal abuse or guns or whatever.

Wow, this is incredibly stupid (on Meta's part). Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Is it just me, or does it seem like Facebook/Meta has always been much dumber about how to actually run a business than other big tech companies? I think they just got where they are because they filled a void with Facebook and took advantage of network effects. Nothing they've ever done has really seemed all that "good" to me overall, except little bits and pieces.

Most recently, I got forced onto their "Messenger" app, because they basically disabled the "Messenger Lite" app. This new app is MUCH larger and more bloated, has a bunch of features I don't care about, and now won't even let me log in because "waiting for network". A little searching online seems to show this is a common problem and everyone hates this app, and many more are pissed that they've been forced off the Lite app.

Not surprised by this at all. “Animal trading” is such a touchy category within Meta. Once you get flagged for this, you can basically kiss your account goodbye. It is impossible to get support, even in cases like this where it clearly has nothing to do with animals. Meta simply will not touch it. There are other categories like this too. Ultimately it is easier/safer for Meta to just wholesale ban any use of terms even if it seems really stupid. This will only continue as Meta continues its exit from detailed ad targeting. Google is doing the same thing too.

Similar story: I had an old account locked and I wanted to delete it. They asked me security questions about random Facebook friends to verify my identity, and I had no idea who they were. So I sent in my driver's license photo, which was rejected for an unknown reason.. and around and around it went.

I ended up finding a random Facebook corporate email address online and I just kept spamming it in hopes that a human would actually read it and do something about it. To my surprise, it actually worked.

AIs should be globally banned from making final decisions. Whenever an AI makes a decision, it should be guaranteed that you can demand a human to actually review the case, evaluating evidence manually. It is also questionable whether lifetieme bans should be allowed to exist, let alone full bans like when Google's AI dislikes something in your app and you loose access to your GMail and everything forever (in my oppinion not even a terrorist deserves this).

If there's enough people who were wrongfully banned for any reason on Facebook because their review process is broken, maybe it's time for a class action suit?

Also, banning somebody and not keeping the relevant evidence, not showing the evidence to the client so that they can archive the case themselves to appeal in court? You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?

Because at this point Facebook cannot prove that the people violated the ToS and thus Facebook is restricting the services it offers to then.

This non-sensical auto bans is a well-known phenomenon in the ads industry (personal/small companies). There is even a cottage industry of companies that's specialized in recovering banned ads accounts and/or getting around bans.

Usual methods for getting around this is creating business accounts via relatives, giving yourself admin rights and using that. Some have success with fake profiles.

That doesn't guarantee against banning of the new accounts, you just move on to new ones.

Because ROI is so damn good on these platforms, people put up with all kinds of BS to use them.

I'll take two pandas please.

I'm convinced you'll be better off advertising elsewhere anyway, Facebook is a big advertising platform for sure, but are your coding students there? Maybe. I think they're here and on YouTube. :-)

I was waiting to hear from someone else on this. We were planning on spending a decent chunk of our seed money on Meta Ads. After 3 verifications and repeated bans with no recourse we gave up.

I don't think we can blame this on all AI customer management/support, either. Google Ads assigned us an account manager for the first 90 days, we've upped our spend because they gave us good guidance and we saw conversions.

The irony that Meta remains a cesspit for fake news.

I a digital forensics investigator who owns a small business. I was also banned for life from advertising. Not told why but the only thing I’ve changed is that I started teaching a social media evidence course at university - then almost immediately banned.

Facebook/Meta don’t accept messages from people banned for life. The NSW small business ombudsman won’t touch the case because they only will resolve cases with companies that have Australian contact details.

My history on Facebook is pretty boring. Family photos and news about my advocacy for blind and low vision people and the occasional work post. Pretty mundane stuff.

This article is useful because I thought I was the only one.

I’m not sure about my next steps. I am probably required to notify the uni but I also don’t want to create trouble for them.

I had the same issue a few months ago.

My Facebook account was the admin on a page for a business that we had for 10 years.

At some point in the last year, FB apparently flagged my advertising account and seeked request. I didn't respond in time, and that account is now permenantly banned from advertising with no way to request a review lol..

Whatever! I figured the universe was telling me that the good old days of advertising to real people on FB were gone.

I did however want to start gathering insights on potential audiences with the Meta pixel; so I just simply created a new Facebook account, and then a new page with 0 advetising history.

That seemed to work, and haven't had any issues.. Old account is still flagged; and I just have to flip between my accounts when I actually use FB.

I know I'm thinking about the wrong part of this article, but... even if the adverts really were about real pandas and pythons, the adverts were for courses in them. Am I not allowed to advertise a course on how to look after your python on Facebook? Or a course on the status of pandas in the wild? Even that seems very odd. (Maybe the adverts didn't read that way.)

> get this — Meta thought that he was dealing in live animals, which is forbidden.

> That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas

Hah I suspected that was going to be the punchline, but waited for confirmation

It is believable. What is not so much is that they did a review with real people

I've experienced similar issues multiple times in the past with meta, especially while advertising french and italian restaurants whose names and menus, once automatically translated in english during the publishing checks, would trigger all kind of bans.

One of the most hilarious cases came up with southern-italian style braised fennels, whose internal machine-translation naming by meta was not exactly LGBTQ friendly.

As I said in a previous post, most of these cases were usually resolved trough the legal department of the agency, It was considered basically a requirement of being in the ad business.

I had the same thing with Ebay. Tried to sell an old linguistics textbook. First thing I ever tried to sell, new account. Instantly banned. Refused to tell me why.

Total lack of accountability.

Guess I'm never buying anything from Ebay.

I hang out in the whitewater community on Facebook and there’s tons of stories about bans for selling dagger kayaks because the systems believe you’re selling weapons.

https://www.dagger.com/us/

My girlfriend also got banned from advertising on Meta for literally no reason. It’s been also a year since she last advertised her Facebook page (she’s a gerontologist).

They are probably banning most smaller advertisers and sticking with the largest ones.

Lesson learned: don't click on that Appeal button. That's the human confirmation they're looking for in the otherwise 100% automated system with no human in the loop.

Water companies, emergency rooms, and the Post Office basically aren't allowed to ban people. Meta is so big that they shouldn't be allowed to either.

I've had a python code sharing post blocked on Facebook because it "violates community standards". If I remember right it was a script to search a word doc and highlight certain words by changing the color. Their bots are stupid.

Meta is really the worst company I have dealt with in the past. We are trying to advertise with a budget of 700€ per month (in total over 50.000€) and they just can't figure out the payment process.

First they wouldn't let us add credit cards or normal accounts, just Paypal.. okay

Then (after many support calls and cases always by different agents of course) they activated our credit card. One payment got through then no more. Meanwhile on Meta side the "unpaid balance" is rising because they won't charge the card (support didn't help, mixed us up twice and invited us to a video call that was booked by someone else already)

Total madness. They just won't let us pay them

I've had my Facebook account for years, I've used it as Facebook in it's early days and as blank business account with real name and passport details later. My ad spent was several thousand dollars over the years, and even thought Facebook was billing me for wrong clicks (10-30% did not fit my criteria, mostly wrong country) I went back again to publish some ads.

After a week or so Facebook suddenly banned all my ads about cotton masks my grandmum has sewn. I tried to publish one ad again and since then have been banned forever.

No way to contact, no way to ask why. No warning and no rule changes at this point.

As we improve the accuracy of automation and now the neural network, once laughed as a toy idea, does cough up something half decent, people ask "But who take a responsibility when things get wrong?" My answer is nobody.

These software giants never take a responsibility of wrongful automated result for decades but we keep using it.

Meta doesn't have an incentive to fix this case. It costs them manual labor of many manhours that outweigh the ad revenue from this person.

It probably keep this way.

There are many digital marketing executives who are banned to advertise on Facebook. FB decides they did something wrong once, and now they cannot advertise anymore. So effectively they cannot find a job in digital advertising because Meta wants you to use your personal account for advertising even when you are working for a company. This needs to stop. Maybe this could be moved under the scope of "EU Digital Markets Act" with some effort.

"The UK GDPR gives people the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions, including profiling, which have a legal or similarly significant effect on them."

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

I will never understand why Facebook isn't willing to take action against known phishing pages/advertisers, and even let them boost post with advertising, while legitimate advertisers get much less impression. At one point, a scam about high-return investment targeting elders are very common. The same applies to online gambling (it may be legal in many countries like the Philippines, but not in my country) and 419 scam (known in my country as "call center scam")

Another annoying things is the use of affiliate links to online marketplace (Lazada is a notable example; sometimes it can lead to a more sinister destination, such as malware-dropping site) masquerading as a link to news site, which was often spammed in a comment below the news post. They even typed in my language even though the account appears to be based in Indonesia or the Philippines. I have heard numerous people reporting this, but so far the situation isn't improving at all (and can even get worse)

Out of interest, what was the text title of the ad? and which image did you use to advertise?

I'm not defending Meta and I agree that AI shouldn't used to review appeals, but the title is clearly a clickbait. Based on the article, they banned you because AI thought you're trading live animals not because you're teaching Python.

So I'm curious to see the original title and ad image.

Regardless of the reason, of course not acceptable. We have to insist on complete transparency, and life-time bans should always be liftable through some sort of dialogue. It is impossible to have a productive relationship with someone that abuses AI to conduct reviews that should clearly have been done by a human. Facebook cannot be trusted. Period. Their conduct is extremely abusive.

Same lack of proper review prevents people from restoring hacked accounts, even in cases where it is completely obvious that the accounts were hacked. E.g. The name and/or e-mail was changed by a user in a different country than the account owner.

If Facebook has access to such sophisticated AI, then it is quite amazing that they cannot deduce (even without AI) that an account was hacked. A set of if statements in their code should be enough to check for typical suspicious circumstances. E.g. The user is suddenly in a different country, and happen to change their name (highly unusual and very suspicious circumstances)!!

I can understand your frustration. I was banned from Google ads and to this day I have no clue why. I was selling a speech recognition product. I appealed once, but it didn't get anywhere.

These big companies don't care much about small users and can be quite nasty in their language. They have no interest to make the process fair because they have all the power.

This reminds me of Instagram which I rarely use but one time when I did it indicated that I had been blocked for some reason.

You have to take a picture of yourself yes a selfie (yuck) and send it to Instagram. The funny thing is I have no selfies on Instagram so what are they using or comparing my selfie to? I was unblocked and that was that no idea what happened.

Meta is an addictive toxic shithole and a blight on the world. I deleted my Facebook account about 5 years ago and my life has been way better ever since.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...

So... certainly with social media, the rules the rules and only we know the rulebook.

The incentives are just stacked towards not having policies.

First once you have a policy, that policy can be criticised. Nothing withstands criticism these days. Politics also lost its explicit policy statements for the same reason.

If one politician has a policy plan, his opponent's "policy" will be a critique of his plan and that gives the opponent an edge.

Second, once e have a policy, you need to implement it. FB is better resourced than all the others, but none of these "policies" are even designed to be implemented broadly.

Vagueness just serves, and if you aren't vague you will regret it.

If you are clear, there will be a ton of criticism of your clear policy. Then there will be criticism of your imperfect implementation.

If you're vague and concommital, you can half implement a half baked plan plan and change or drop it when you want.

Remember when Facebook just flat out deleted Native American's accounts because they thought their names weren't "real people names?" These guys are shitty, always have been shitty, always will be shitty. They don't have good product manages who research use-cases and examples, they don't have good QA or test data, and their customer support isn't empowered to fix the issues customers report. Just a shitty company through and through.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/facebooks-name-policy-...

When I created a new Instagram account for a project I'm working on, it instantly locked my account and said it was restricted. It takes you to a page where you can submit a form asking for a review, and when you submit that forms it errors out. Sigh.

At a previous job at an enterprise cybersecurity company, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads across Facebook and Instagram and _constantly_ were having ads and posts flagged as being about "hacking".

What is the point of having all the "greatest" AI scientists in the world if you can't solve meaningful problems of these systems when used in production...

This is a product failure, an engineering failure, a research failure, etc. etc. I don't mean to pick on just this one exampl as there are instances in all of big tech [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

FB's enforcement style is shitty but IMO the larger point here is that they're no longer built for small business advertisement

if you're an agency or if you're large enough to have an account manager, things go smoothly

if you have facebook / insta cred and try to build a following on top, you're probably also okay

but if you get on there to build a business from scratch, and don't have the budget or creative team, it doesn't work for you. I tried last year, learned some tricks, but ultimately came away with 'this isn't what my business needs right now'

Ha! I’m at Pycon MEA and yesterday a speaker from Namibia was talking about how one of the hurdles in evangelizing Python in Africa was that people thought of dangerous snakes and didn’t like it.

The elephant in the room is that this happens because these companies are too big. They command such monopolies over their walled gardens that everyone must advertise with them, so there is no requirement to provide customer service to any but the largest accounts.

With many smaller companies in a competitive environment, some would be forced to provide a good customer experience to differentiate their service. Theoretically, at least.

(Note the advertisers are the customers, not the users.)

I wonder if anyone is recognizing that the fail here is in removing a human element in the support and instead relying on a far inferior technology to handle cases it can't handle.

In other words, the problem is that suddenly a machine is not only making laws but also executing them. But we as a society did not agree to hand our laws to the machine. Luckily, the area where these laws apply, is very narrow atm - it is only the fb space. But the tendency seems alarming.

We need a social credit system that is more like what eBay feedback was like in 1996 than what China has today.

Everyone who has ever had feelings with me should be able to leave feedback on me, and I should be able to leave feedback on everyone I ever dealt with.

It should be illegal to share a calculated score for money. Instead, a scripting interface similar to Excel formulas should allow us all to write out own metrics for who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.

I've also been banned from advertising on Facebook. The story is pretty funny, I spent a little bit amount of money to try a campaign, none really converted so I gave up. Then 6 months later (yes you read that right), Facebook banned the completely inactive account which had done nothing during those 6 months.

They do still send me ToS updates by email though like it somehow matters and that I'm somehow bound to it.

There's a lot of debate about whether the first amendment (freedom of speech) should apply to private platforms like Facebook, but maybe such discussion should also include the sixth amendment (right to a fair judicial process), if we take the position that these rights are inherent things that society should guarantee, not just restrictions on what the government can do.

Going forward probably the answer to dumb AI which can't figure if python is snakes or code, is smarter AI. I mean FB and Google are unlikely to suddenly hire thousands more smart people to sort this but already AI like ChatGTP seems smart enough to do a reasonable job on understanding "why was I banned?" and "no, code not wild animals" etc.

In a company I worked for 20+ years ago the IT set up an email "spam filter" that used a big list of regexes, but the problem was the filter ran on the raw message, so it also filtered SMTP headers.

I noticed this when an email that was routed through smtp123.essex.hp.com or something similar never arrived to my mailbox.

This is only my experience. I had great organic reach for my page. I thought I will get even more if I advertise it. Big mistake. Advertising helped a bit, but the moment I stopped paying they cut my organic reach.

I'll never touch advertising again. It seems to be designed for start ups with VC money to burn and not small business.

This is super weird.

The review loop should at least have gone to a person. It’s hard to assume both review loops missed something like that.

I have never put ads on FB - I would assume that there is at least a tagging, or topic orientation for ads (Education, Coding, CS, IT, for example).

The fact that the full ban came so quickly after the appeal is also very strange.

Facebook made an ai tool using Python (pytorch) and might've used it to ban you.

You need someone there to submit an oops for you.

I guess this message was through Message within your account?

If you check the sender they just created the account, and the link looks like Facebook.

I get this within a couple of hours after my first advertisement on a new page. This is probably phishing, and I guess it was not Facebook contacting you in the first place.

I just want to say thank you for your python courses. I learned a lot over the years from your teaching style.

Of course we can blame AI, lack of humans and stuff.

But the good news is you'll never advertise again on Meta and you can inspire others to do the same. These giants have too much power and since the justice system that should break them up is corrupt or not willing to do the job, it is up the users to do it.

This happens to many many small businesses, they unilaterally ban you for nothing shady. I'm talking about mom and pop stores, businesses who have been using FB ads for ages. Suddenly poof, that marketing channel and the revenue that comes with it is gone and is not appealable.

Needs someone to submit an "oops."

When I started there, the mere act of visiting the 2FA page caused an irreversible hellban... not once, not twice, but 3x. Each page on Facebook is really a Hack controller with many layers of abstraction and various byzantine messes behind them.

This is a hilarious and kinda obvious mistake to allow in your system (if you work with data for couple of month at least it is). But it is also very surprising, that this process is not being turned into a stream of profit and good pr. Like, allow paid human supervision....

I remember from twenty years ago, Amazon recommended a book for dementia patients, related to purchase of an AS/400 manual. Because of the name similarity between the IT author and other book's illustrator. We couldn't move one step forward.

Were you selling 2 or 3 pythons?

TLDR: A Meta ads reviewer or AI thought he was selling Pythons and Pandas when that's just the name of the programming language he teaches. Then made worse by Meta not having any real appeal process.

In the other hand, you can post explicit hate speech against homosexuals in Facebook and they will reject your report automatically. I would have expected that FB actually uses all that NLP research...

I can’t believe people are making these tools out of endangered species.

I dont think its tripping only over the words Python and Pandas but possibly also the word "courses" used in the same sentense. They think you are serving those fuzzy animals for dinner ;)

Perhaps their AI is just a big black box, it outputs if banned or not, no reasoning.

No one has cracked proper reasoning AI based like human commonsense. Human commonsense is legit really hard.

huh, I thought this automated suspension from twitter was ridiculous - but at least it wasn't permanent https://medium.com/p/44664b6b2b04/ - be warned reading, crude language found.

A couple of questions.

Does Python run into this as well?

Do Facebook ads for technical content work. If you have successfully done this, I would love to chat.

this is seriously such a hostile behaviour pattern of most tech companies. It should be banned by EU and US regulation

It sounds like the way to advertise on there is a network of fake accounts run by bots. AI vs AI type of approach.

I guess now that Reuven is banned, I should jump on this ;)

(We're friends who both happen to be Python and Pandas trainers.)

> We used technology to detect this violation

Meta, whatever this "technology" may be, you did not use it correctly.

I'm Meta's defense, a Python and a Panda trained to work together would be really dangerous!

Reminds me of an acquaintance who had their Instagram account taken over. Support is just… crickets.

Check if anyone who is competing with you has personal connections with Meta, or someone just don't like you.

Meta staff have been hijacking Facebook, Insta accounts (and few dozen have been fired for doing so). It would be not surprising if some working for Meta, or their spouse or friend, is doing what you are doing and they are cutting your legs.

I got the exact same permanent ban for supposedly violating Facebook’s advertising policies, but I’ve never ran a single ad there. My account was unused for about five years, when I recently logged in to try the WhatsApp API, I got an email asking for a document to confirm my identity. I sent the email and received a successful response. About a week later I received an e-mail of a permanent ban from fb ads. Annoyingly, even though I had no plans to advertise there, I can’t generate a system user and get a longer than two months access token for my WhatsApp api. Also, my business (registered within my personal account and I’m the sole member) has full advertising capabilities. TLDR - I got permanently banned form ads without ever running an ad - due to the add ban I can’t create a _system user_ and so my WhatsApp api tokens are limited to the two month extensions allowed on the temporary tokens - my dev/business within my one account can advertise on fb normally - obviously there nothing resembling support from fb

The silver lining here seems to be that Meta deletes logs after 180 days? Shrug

Outrageous. Bans like this without clear proof of violation should be illegal.

On Facebook I get ridiculous amounts of crypto scam ads falsely claiming to be associated with Elon Musk or his companies. I think even simple text based filters could catch them. It's been happening for years. I keep thinking surely they'll have it under control soon.

Seems they are busy creating filters & banning accounts, just not the right ones.

He's got friends at Meta.

What do people do who don't have friends at Meta?

Honestly I feel like it would be a reasonable decision to have the government step in and give us a website to request unbanning accounts.

A lot of these services seem so Integrated into living stopping people from using them seems like taking a rights away from people.

Especially with digital laws being added in CA wouldn't be surprised if we as citizens get to control the digital oligarchs within the next 20 years.

I'm curious which images he used to advertise.

AI trained with python banned python ads?

Someone you know works for Meta ?

The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know).

How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.

I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.

the machine is down

>That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas. Never mind that the first is a programming language and the second is a library for data analysis in Python. Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me.

If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform.

This is why we should be fighting tooth and nail against both walled gardens and monopolies. These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world, there is no excuse for not providing a human contact who can at least verify the grounds for suspension, and some kind of appeal system.

I don’t really care how good Meta is on the open source side of things. They’re still a horrible company when it comes to literally everything else.

I had the exact same thing happen to me, only I have never run any ads on Facebook. Got the ominous "you are suspended from running ads on Meta", which was very confusing since I've never run a single ad on any of their platforms, appealed out of curiosity and was met with the "you're banned forever" canned response. Crappy AI making stupid, arbitrary decisions.

Damn. Perhaps I should rethink the name of my new programming language, Children.

Pretty weird how they delete the evidence after 180 days, but apparently the automatic review is still able to pass final judgement after that window closes.

> Now, I'm not a big believer in "there's nothing to be done", especially when it comes to companies and software, both of which are created and managed by people.

You're right of course. Axiomatically there is always "something to be done".

But corporate technology brings out laziness, contempt for others, a lack of self-respect and a blindness to ethics.

It seems we don't understand why yet. Despite a great start in social tech critique in the 1960s from people like Ellul, Postman and Mumford, it remains a frontier of psychology and computer science where almost nobody dares to tread.

Maybe a sincere and sustained research programme would turn-up that most of the systems we build today are psychologically and socially harmful to us.

Perhaps this mirrors the way it took us half a century to see how fossil fuels and unbounded growth were invisibly destroying our ecological foundations, only this time we are destroying the capital of social bonds, mutuality and care, long term planning and so much more.

It is ironic then, that these engines of societal decay like Meta started out life being called "social networks".

> whereas companies like Google, who seem to employ at least some humans in their advertising department

What? Google has humans? Where?

Did I miss something in the article? His only evidence that he was banned because of python (supposedly a ban on dealing in live animals) is that some other guy on Linked In who also advertised for Python courses was also banned and he claimed, without evidence, that it was because of the live animal constraint? This is not very convincing evidence.

It definitely sounds like something has gone wrong, but OP is jumping to conclusions on pretty thin evidence. I'm also conscious we're only hearing one side of a story here. How many people have come to HN to complain about being banned from Stripe only for it to turn out they were running an illegal crypto casino or whatever.

That is great news!

Title is misleading. They weren't banned because they "teach Python. " but because Meta has faulty algorithms.

At no point does the author provide a single example of an advert they created.

Does no-one else find this slightly fishy?

90% of these posts are just sob stories because they fucked up and he fucked up at least with "waiting a year". Makes absolutely no sense to me.

I mean who cares. Some website blocked some person from spending money on advertising on their platform. This person who already has their own website and a lot of means to propagate whatever they wish and conduct business on the Internet in many other ways.

It happens all, the, time. Also this non-sense is repetitive here, with nothing new to add, nothing technical, nothing intersting.

Just useless filler content, to induce some fake indignation towards some useless entertainment platform that will change nothing.