So a few days ago my Facebook ad account was disabled because my personal account, which I use to control it, has apparently been flagged as having broken Facebook standards. You can click to have the decision reviewed, which I did and for which I had to send a picture of my driver’s license (!) to Meta. The review was rejected and now there is absolutely no recourse or even way to contact Facebook to find out what it even is I allegedly did.
There are two interesting things about this affair:
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I have to the best of my knowledge never done anything that breaks Facebook rules, neither on my personal account nor on the business accounts. The only thing I can even imagine being anything out of the ordinary is that I often report and call out obvious Nazis etc. when I see them on public posts. Those reports are almost universally rejected
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I have never in my life posted or paid for an ad on Facebook. I don’t need an ad account, nor do I care that it is deactivated. The only reason I administrate two business accounts is because I manage the public facing accounts of a research project I am in and of a series of academic talks I co-organise. Neither of these pages needs to or wants to pay for ads to drive traffic. They’re for a tightly networked niche audience anyway.
So my reaction to this is mild amusement, although if I were a small business owner this could absolutely devastate my entire livelihood and it is so interesting to me to see first hand how I have absolutely no recourse against this company 's decision, and not even a right to know what it is I allegedly did wrong, nor any way of reaching a customer representative. My only recourse was the one button in the business centre for requesting a review. When the review came back negative (without any further comments as to why) the button disappeared and that’s that. Apparently I’m permanently banned from posting ads on Facebook now.
