November 29, 2020

Facebook Accidentally Bans Thousands of Small Businesses from Advertising During Black Friday Week

If you’re a small business advertising on Facebook, then you’re well-aware of the recent glitches, unwavering performance volatility, bugs, and crashes that have been happening within Facebook’s Ad Manager within the last 6 months. As anyone advertising on Facebook, this is extremely unnerving and leaves users without trust or reliability in Facebook’s ad platform. Millions of small businesses and advertisers across the world rely on Facebook Ads for product and service sales to survive, especially with the massive revenue losses to most businesses during COVID-19. Facebook has always claimed to “help small businesses”, as they have even launched a free Facebook storefront for businesses during the initial pandemic shutdown. For most businesses advertising on Facebook, Black Friday Week has looked to be the biggest sale event of year, allowing businesses to recover some of their losses from the shutdowns relating to COVID-19.

However, with Black Friday sales week looming in, Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Facebook have other priorities…like policing what users post on their platform, and censoring what information is shared on Facebook regarding the 2020 Presidential Election.

Below are a few links to document what Facebook has been focusing their efforts on in the last 6 months:

THE BLACK FRIDAY FACEBOOK ADS MASS BAN

The months prior to Black Friday sales week, Facebook has released that they will be prioritizing their efforts into censoring false information about the election. With millions of posts being shared on Facebook every minute, this is quite the task for Facebook to take on. With the election, COVID-19, and social issues on the rise, Facebook decided that they would introduce a stricter Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to monitor the ad content being published by advertisers on their ads platform, so they could focus their human efforts into policing user posts and election misinformation. However, over the last 3 months, Facebook’s AI system has falsely flagged hundreds of thousands of advertising accounts, disabling them from advertising. Once your advertising account access has been restricted, then you’ll need to file an appeal that will need to be reviewed manually by a human. The issue is, that all of the humans at Facebook are policing Holocaust Denial posts, and a manual review of your appeal by a human, within the hundreds of thousands of restricted accounts could take months. What this means in non-technical talk, is that a robot flagged your advertising account along with hundreds of thousands of others, and a human who will need to review your account to get it back working will not be able to do so for months. All of the money that your business is earning through promoting through Facebook Ads is now lost, and may never be recovered.

During the Black Friday sales week, a horrific amount of Facebook Ad accounts belonging to small businesses have been wrongly flagged for violating their terms of service, and were banned from advertising on Facebook through the biggest sale week of the year. Small businesses were left in the cold and with underwhelming sales numbers from their reliance on Facebook Ads. Facebook does not have customers support, and their Facebook Business Chat will not reinstate your account, give insight as to why your account was flagged, and they will not give you an estimate as to when your ad account will be back online. Facebook admitted their AI systems were faulty and were flagging ad photos, such as the photo of an onion as being “overtly sexual”, and banning the account. The Black Friday Facebook Ads Mass Ban has left hundreds of thousands of small businesses in peril, due to Facebook’s negligence in effectively managing and maintaining their own advertising platform, that millions of small businesses worldwide rely on. Beyond this, Facebook released that their Conversion Tool (which tracks how many purchases, sign-ups, etc from Facebook ads) was error-ridden for the last 12 months and was over-inflating advertiser’s metrics.

Overall, Facebook has failed small businesses and has failed to maintain their ONLY revenue stream…their advertising platform. I think the frustrations and let-downs from the Black Friday Facebook Ads Mass Ban will be the last straw that Facebook advertisers will have with Facebook Ads. With the increase of popular ad platforms such as Google, YouTube, SnapChat, and LinkedIn, advertisers and small businesses are doing themselves an injustice by relying on Facebook for their income, while Facebook’s concern is policing what articles and comments people share on their personal Facebook profile.

More Articles Documenting the Facebook Ad Bans: