Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency | Hacker News Reader

Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency

mojodojo.io

149 pointszenincognito109 comments

The whole article doesn't even contain the word 'AI' or 'LLM." There is zero explanation about why they think it's caused by an AI Meta deployed recently. The clickbait game is crazy.

> We manage millions of dollars in annual Meta ad spend.

Oh nvm. They're full-time clickbaiters... what else did I expect.

> They set up a dedicated work account, which, by the way, is standard professional practice

Standard professional practice invented by ad agencies themselves, against Facebook's policy[0].

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/help/975828035803295/

No serious company wants their key users to log into a platform with their personal accounts, this would be a security nightmare and asking for trouble

I wonder how exactly is social media managed at larger companies. I never found an enterprise type login for Facebook, and the only way to log in is by first creating a personal account?

you’re supposed to use your personal account to create a business “profile” for the company you work for. the company is supposed to have created a space for it on business.facebook.com

creating a “pro” facebook account is indeed disallowed by the facebook’s policy

I’ve done that multiple times. works well but you indeed to not have a clear separation between work and personal life, which is not good. I don’t mind it because I don’t use facebook, but it could be a problem for other people.

I honestly don‘t get how facebook think the world works…

Usually through enterprise social media management apps. Hootsuite is the first that comes to mind, I'm sure there are many more. But I don't know what the auth looks like underneath that, an API for sure, but whose token?

The link you posted says:

> It's against our Community Standards to maintain more than one personal account.

> Bear in mind that a personal profile is for non-commercial use and represents an individual person.

Really unclear to me what a business is supposed to do. Not a particularly useful link.

Set up a business page from a personal account. That has always been Facebook's stance on this issue. Like, for a decade or more.

And before someone says "it's a bad policy..." yeah it is. But I don't think one gets to complain about how AI ruined their business when the whole business practice is built upon violating their platform's policy.

I was contacted by somone at meta last year with a job offer. To proceed I needed to use a Facebook account which I don’t have. I tried to set one up and was instantly banned.

That was at their request in order to come on as staff.

Their system is ridiculously broken.

>AI is killing our agency

>We manage millions of dollars in annual Meta ad spend.

So AI is doing something good for once :)

>We have contacted Meta support dozens of times over the past 30 days. Each representative confirmed that account creation and monitoring are now handled almost entirely by AI. Despite successfully completing required face verifications, our accounts continue to be flagged and banned by automated parameters. There is currently no path for manual intervention; even internal support tickets are failing to reach human reviewers with the authority to resolve these systemic blocks.

>Oh nvm. They're full-time clickbaiters... what else did I expect.

There is nothing clickbait about this article. I fail to understand why take such a hostile approach to something on the internet where you completely miss the point under contention - auto account bans via AI

Ad industry is one of the most vile things on the internet. You won't find any sympathy here. You might have been blisfully unaware that you are hated in the nation until now, but noone is wishing you well. Even though the problem you rise is legitimate and interesting the internet couldn't have asked for a more deserving entity to have it.

That's because the article is slop.

Even if it’s not, this kind of business is untenable now.

You be surprised what agencies turn over.

I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.

2 days ago I tried to create new gmail account and Google insisted that my phone number was used too many times. Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account... Submit my billing information, that same that I use on other accounts but now there is an extra validation step that requires my ID and copies of my bank statement. Wasn't happy about that but tried it anyway. They expected my entire checking account number to appear on my bank statement. My bank account number is for my entire account and not just the checking portion but even if they were the same my bank redacts parts of the number so that if anyone gets my statement they can't just start drafting money.

The additional information section where I explain things is obviously ignored because the auto generated responses are sent pretty fast.

I can't decide what the saddest part is, the fact that their "give us a moment" emails that are send immediately after submitting still say they need extra time to process the request due to limited staffing because of covid or the fact that Gemini was brutal in criticizing them when I asked if it was normal to expect complete account numbers on the statement.

Similar to OP, the embedded help chat got in a loop of telling me I needed to speak to a rep to fix the issue and when attempting to connect me it would deny the request because I wasn't a paying customer yet.

The sad part is that you gave your information and kept trying to give them money despite all of this hassle? What is exactly you are looking for? If it's email, there is tons of providers out there who will be happy to take your money.

It was more that for past reasons they already have all my information so I'd rather avoid giving to out to other companies.

And their spam filtering is hard to beat.

Ended up narrowing my alternatives to fastmail and Microsoft. And since one of those already also had my info I went with the existing relationship.

As a Russian, maybe they are trying to make sure you're not a Russian.

It used to be that if I pay I am ok, now if I pay you go to jail. so you better make sure i'm not the wrong type of guy to accept money from

And there are many tons more providers who will be happy to take your money while promising to spam google. TFA prob ain't exactly legit, eh?

the only thing I can think that would make it imperative that you get a gmail instead of other email provider is that google provides the ecosystem of apps and google apps script to automate them, if you have built up a lot of tooling for automating things it can be a pretty sweet platform to do things in.

> I think most big tech companies are like this and it's just going to get worse as AI adoption increases internally.

Welcome to UB, at scale, in every language.

Everyone loves to complain about C (and C++) UB; well, now, you have that in every language.

We're at the point now that my manually written (non-trivial) projects C hits fewer undefined behaviour than even trivial projects constructed with an LLM and human "review".

(I even wrote a blog post about it!)

What does UB refer to here?

Undefined Behavior

The arch nemesis of software engineering. The exceptionally exceptional exception. It doesn’t throw, it glides. It festers. It waits until production day. It rears its head from the dead. The demon with 1000 names…

The guy who orders minus 1.5 beers lol

Kind of ironic, using a UT in a comment about undefined behavior.

> Fine, I'll pay for a new workspace account...

That's bad for you don't have the account yet but at Google, once you're a paying customer --and hence you're not the product anymore--, there are actual people helping you on the phone when you call them. Of course the catch-22 here is that you don't have the Workspace account yet, so you may sorry out of luck.

I’ve been trying to sell my old iPhone and AirPods on Facebook Marketplace. Since I wanted them gone quickly, I priced them a bit lower than similar listings but Facebook instantly flagged them as “counterfeit.” I thought maybe the issue was my photos, so I relisted with clearer pictures… same result. Every appeal just gets an automated rejection with no real explanation. Now I’m getting warnings that I’m “at risk of losing access to Marketplace.”

It honestly feels like their AI is using a hard, oversimplified rule: “iPhone 8 listed for $80? Must be counterfeit.”

Man, fuck Facebook Marketplace. I cannot figure out for the life of me why everyone decided to abandon the perfectly useable Craigslist for that unreliable, buggy, scam-laden pile of hot garbage. Never once have I had a single good experience with Facebook Marketplace.

I've ran into this even in my limited advertising on meta - they actaully want you to use the actual individual's facebook account to manage the ads accounts, even on behalf of the clients through the agency.

This is kind of insane behavior but when you remember that google actually supports enterprise domains and SSO and facebook has very little of that - or relatively little - it makes sense. If you are personally banned from facebook for whatever reason, you cannot have a business account under another email - once you validate your identity it regurgitates the ban.

Despite this being an obvious antipattern to security it is very much by design for meta.

Yeah, Meta wants you to have a single Facebook account under your legal name that you use for all your personal and professional contact with them. Never mind if you’re freelancing for three companies that don’t want to be linked to each other and running the page for your church and your karate studio.

So of course people try to set up multiple accounts, but anyone over a certain age setting up a new account is naturally flagged as suspicious. The solution is just to allow a type of accounts that only manage business pages, but that would probably mess up their stats.

I ran into the same thing, I deleted my Facebook account years ago, needed a business account to run ads, signed up and instantly banned when I wasn't even banned when was originally a Facebook user, guess it's punishment for my desertion.

This same scenario happened to me as well, and my “appeal” was instantly automatically denied.

If platforms didn't hand out bans like candy (probably USING said AI!) this MIGHT make a bare modicum of sense

Considering that ads are a pest and all Meta platforms make Hell look like a vacation location, my empathy is very limited.

And building your "agency" around a sole platform..

They say they also run on Google and Tiktok

The same thing is happening to end users, the consumers that they maybe want seeing those ads. Random, totally out of the blue bans on Meta platforms for no rhyme or reason. It's all over reddit:

r/facebookdisabledme

r/FixMyInstagram

r/InstagramDisabledBans

r/MetaLawsuits

It's almost impossible to create a new Facebook account nowadays and I wonder if that's one of the cause of the decline of Facebook

I wonder if they ever had enough of the California Attorney General on them (after people posted guides on how to seek resolution through that channel)

btw saw recommendations to use a VPN to be able to use the complaint form… overall, wonder how much Meta cost taxpayers there (maybe they make up for it?)

It has been happening in other platforms too. I had a tough time creating a new LinkedIn account after deleting mine around 10 years ago. At one point one day in the new account I got banned, then I submitted my ID and got in only to be banned again within the same timespan. All the same accusations that the profile information I submitted was not “correct”, translation: I was not me according to someone else’s idea of what being me is, even though I was able to show them a proper ID.

I only got it working stable after finding an obscure email on Reddit and re-sending my ID to a completely different confirmation system.

I wasn't going to send my driver's license to some overseas contractor... I eventually hunted down a form for submitting a notarized statement proving who I was. It's more than a bit ridiculous.

How do they expect future growth then?

In general, its really stunning that Meta stock price grew that much since 2012 - when they IPO'd in 2012, I thought i will be a "cheap stock" around 50 - 70 USD.

Facebook appears to want go turn your grandparents into AIs and sell them back yo you when they die.

Oh then I guess it is good that they dead already. And they never had an account. So I am safe.

Yes, but society rwquires everyone to be safe.

nice username... I was going to say, we warned about this with the google+ real name policy "nymwars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars and the cloudflare AI bot blocking that blocks humans

Yes it's potentially good for reducing spam and terribly good for collecting personal information for advertisers. Both at the expense of making social networks inaccessible to real people.

I don't think this is an AI issue. It is about the terms of use: they don't allow a second account, even if it's intended for ad management. The recommended way is to use Meta Business Manager via the existing account.

This article is LLM generated, has the typical structure, that I’m tired of reading by now. They Always write using this rhythm, repeating 3 times a list of dramatic stuff “every this, every that”.

Could be. But they're in the SEO business, articles sounded like that long before LLMs were trained on them to produce the same crap.

Exactly. It's been like that long before LLM bullshit.

Can confirm this is fully human written.

And who are you and why should we trust you?

or it has the typical structure because that is what content providers made their workers provide over the last decade due to engagement stats showing that got the most users clicking, responding, subscribing, and that is what the LLM was trained on.

Stop giving your money at Meta, it’s a simple solution and an ethical one.

Easy to say but livelyhood of many families might depend on this agency functioning.

All the more reason for them to start finding alternatives ASAP, at least as a backup. Those with knowledge and skill should help them.

The grift economy must continue because so many have mouths to feed

Just abandon your livelihood, simple as.

I couldn’t sympathize more, but if there is no money in shoveling more ads into the web, then find something else to do.

I would but Google charge me $5 a click and nobody will engage with my Reddit ads (not even an ASCII dong in the open comments anymore) and zero conversions.

Reddit ads (disguised and interleaved with normal posts) are especially deceptive. I refuse to look at them on principle.

Facebook doesn’t need “users” or even Advertisers anymore, they have Ai to create and consume all the content & likes!

Agencies have a lot of control and say in how clients spend their money.

AI can’t buy things yet.

Openclaw is on it

If meta wants to cut out the middleman and let businesses pay directly for ai generated ads, I doubt they have any incentive to fix this.

This wont help the customers from the article?

The reason why they need agencies to deploy ads is thats its not their core business - so they wont be able to setup Meta ads on their own?

Facebook will provide AN AI to the ad agency client. Ad agency redundant.

I tried signing up for Instagram once because for some reason there are a lot small businesses in artsy spaces (jewelry, etc.) who basically make it the main way to interact with them (or did) and I got banned almost instantly for no reason I could discern. Kind of gave up at that point (well, after trying to go through their "show an ID process" and it not working) and if I want to see some artist's insta I ask my wife. Don't care that much about the agency stuff, but their account management situation is indeed totally broken.

Switch off your ad blocker/pi hole temporarily..

I tried three times of getting insta-banned before getting advised here to do the same.

In a similar vein I made an account on ebay once years ago, and inside a day I was banned for "unpaid seller fees"

On my one day old account that had never done a transaction???

Same here, I've not been able to open an account, it's a bit frustrating.

If anyone wonders how AI might end up undermining humanity, this is a small preview. We're gradually handing over more processes to automation (YOLO, right?) while the systems themselves remain fundamentally "non empathetic". Maybe this specific case comes down to a poorly designed prompt from 2024... but so far the trend isn't "friendlier" automation, everyone is after more powerful automation...

I can confirm this is real! Last week I tried to register a Facebook ads account, I got instantly banned for violating TOS ... Like 2 minutes after registration

I really tried my best to open a Facebook account, so I could open a developer account. All correct and real info. Instaban immediately after account creation, immediate "go away forever" email after clicking the "appeal" button.

The fact that you have to open a personal account first, in order to start a developer account seems mad to me. I have no interest at all in having a personal Facebook account.

This doesn't seem anything to do with AI (except in the broad sense the account getting disabled seems automated)

> We hire a senior Paid Ads Specialist. They set up a dedicated work account, which, by the way, is standard professional practice.

It's not "standard professional practice". It's explicitly against Meta's TOS.

In a twist of irony, it feels like this entire post is also written with AI.

Can confirm, not AI written.

no, it's just Australian.

This is probably on purpose because meta wants to kill third party ad buyers and have customers just directly use their first party ad buying platform

I can't tell if this is a real company or not. Look at their about page & you'll notice some really surrealistic prose.

Glad you like it or not! Can confirm we are real.

Humans Deploying Ads that are Killing Our Internet Outsmarted by AI Killing Our Internet. There is some Deep Meta in this somewhere.

deep meta, pun intended?

This same experience is coming to every platform if this passes https://reclaimthenet.org/40-attorneys-general-back-ids-onli...

i have a client whose whatsapp was banned for "violating terms and conditions" but they have not specified what terms or what exactly did he did.

its all a black box mystery. I guess we have to sue them and then compel them to give reasons and unban them

Good luck with that. I'm not sure what basis you would have to do either of those things.

> Sounds reasonable, until you realise that the appeal tool is inside the platform – the same platform the specialist is completely locked out of. You cannot appeal a login ban from behind a login screen.

That's hilarious. Exactly how Bluesky operates.

I'd bill those wasted hours on your clients. Tell them ads are cheaper elsewhere.

But really. Facebook doesn't care. They've got their eyes on your clients and want to cut you out using AI tools that are easy to use.

Except the clients want to be seen on Facebook because their social groups are on there.

AI banned a AI generated ad. Its kind of funny that then some C suite complains. The shit people dig themselves in is truly amazing.

Tech today is treated like some drunken first year collage fratboy a sex doll.

It fails. Every. Time.

Then we get popcorn time.

Can't say I feel even a drop of sympathy here; ads are the bane of the internet. Also very ironic that the company that's built on ads seems to have such disregard for a big spender.

This should not be flagged. I run an agency with 250 full time employees and have the same problem. We spend millions of dollars and get zero help or support from Meta. Crazy.

Feel so sad for you, guys ;( Unfortunately, I do not have any account at Meta, but I wish I had one. I could spare one for you ><

This is wonderful. Someone has found a way to attack Meta using their greed against them, and it’s working :)

The only relationship I have with Meta is Whatspp and I will quit the day my family moves to something else.

It is insane how bad customer support you can get away with, if you’re just big enough.

Yep this has been my experience as well

You base your entire business on Meta. You complain that Meta Leopards eat your face. Just jog on, geezers. The entitlement here is off the charts.

I'm curious whether anybody but wunderkind, we-want-bubble-2.0-after-the-first-one-crashed hype speculation Zuckerberg could have gotten away with theytrustmedumbfucks. Maybe he'd be "making an insightful commentary on human nature" if it wasn't for verified stories to back up his general character like hacking the Crimson reporters

The site has been awful for years and years. That he's shoving AI down throats is the same confirmation we always had: he doesn't care about you (but this was obvious from Graph Search)

Every banned Facebook user is a win against Facebook and misinformation. It would be best if it happened to all Facebook users.

The users with their account issues are such a DRAG! How can a poor trillion dollar company be expected to be able to manage this situation? Worst case scenario is they'd have to gasp hire humans to resolve issues.

Same thing happened to me on discord. Created new account and before first login it was already banned. Yay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com