As you all know, I have been a strong proponent of Facebook marketing for years. It has worked well for me and in the past year has actually begun to pay for itself. However, in the run-up to the election, Facebook has begun screening and rejecting ads for "political or social issues." And if you can caught up in that maelstrom it may be almost impossible to get the ad running. At least I haven't found a way. I have an ad that has been running continuously since January 2019. I keep this running because it now has accumulated a thousand likes, hundreds of shares and hundreds of comments which I always replied to, so there is a personal interchange with the author. So when this ad pops up in someone's feed unsolicited, it at least has an indication that others beside myself think it is a good read. The text runs "WINNER OF THE PINNACLE BOOK AWARD Two thousand years ago, 120 Roman ships a year braved the Indian Ocean to trade in India. In 100AD, three of them continued on to the unknown world of Han China. Aulus Galba saw an easy path to fame and fortune on this expedition, but the Fates had other plans in store for him and his unlikely companions. From the storm-tossed Indian Ocean to the opulent Han court, from the grassy steppes north of China to the forbidding Pamir mountains, they must fight for the lives, searching for the road leading back to Rome." So clearly if there is anything that might be political in there, it might be the single word China. On October the 9th, while running on the monthly boost, it was rejected "for Political Social Issues". I requested review, expecting it to be quickly re-approved after someone realized that the automated screener had erred. It was again rejected, so I contacted the FB Ad Help Center. The tech agreed it was not a political ad, and resubmitted it for review. In checking status after 48 hours, I found it had again been rejected. I discussed this with the techie, who assured me that it was reviewed by a person, but THAT PERSON COULD NOT RELATE TO HIM THE SPECIFIC DETAILS FOR REJECTION. I made sure he had an image of the ad in front of him, and he agreed, as had the other techie, that it was not political. He resubmitted today, but in the meanwhile my sales, which looked like they were going to set a monthly record, have fallen off. Fortunately Amazon ads are keeping me going. Authors using Facebook ads, beware! If your ad falls into this hole, you may not be able to pull it back out!
How bizarre, Lew. Have you tried re-running the ad and removing the word 'China' which I notice appears in two places? You could replace the first one with the Han Dynasty, and just leave the second one out altogether (the steppes will probably do.) And see if that makes a difference. Cheer up. At least you're not trying to make a living selling Fine China.
This policy is likely to change soon. There's been quite a bit of news about big tech and their obscenely overt political screening on all ads and posts. I think a few of their executives are being critically investigated for election interference. Hopefully after the election fallout, then the policies will open back up and your book can be freed.
if this is an actual ad rather than a boosted post it might also be the amount of text as they have bee cracking down overly wordy ads lately
It is in France - the only advertising a presidential campaign gets is a 2 min spot everyday at 7PM (all campaign spots are played back to back in a randomized order) Every other form of advertising is illegal - including in papers or online Posters are supposed to be limited to official election board too but that isn't well respected.
Well, I waited until after the election. Had to start a new ad so went for Christmas ad, without stepping on any PC toes. " AWARD-WINNING BOOKS MAKE GREAT CHRISTMAS GIFTS! Give your special friend a special book, an epic adventure across all the worlds of 2000 years ago. In the Second Century, a hundred Roman ships braved the Indian Ocean each year for the lucrative Distant East trade. In 100AD three continued on to Han China ... and the adventure began!" No problems. And Karen's boost on her new book Jake launched successfully. I may try to resurrect that ad again after Christmas as it has a thread of hundreds of comments and over a thousand likes, which I think makes an ad more likely to attract attention than to be passed by.
its still the biggest advertising market for self published authors by quite some considerable margin...its pay to play though, organic reach is dead
Well my November Christmas post was accepted without issue, though it said basically the same thing. Still running, generating sales and contacts. And Karen's November post was rejected for "cometic and weightloss" advertising to minors. However, that was quickly resolved with human beings
It seems that extreme censorship is the trend this year. I remember when YouTube deleted a lot of the COVID-19 videos in January before it became a pandemic.
the biggest problem is that a lot of their content moderation (its not really censorship since its a private site and they have a perfect right to make rules about content) is done by automated bots... something they share with the AMS platform on amazon... that can lead to ridiculous decisions about "this cover has adult content" because the bot algorithm misinterpreted an innocent picture as something naughty... you can generally get it reversed if you can get hold of a person, but it takes time. that said i know some people who've had their facebook ad accounts suspended and been unable to get them back with little in the way of rational explanation
Artificial Intelligence is genuine stupidity but people use it often, because it is cheaper and easier than having people check every post; and the fact that it catches some percentage of ads/posts with false results is irrelevant to the folks who chose to use AI to save money and do things faster.
They do have the right to make rules about content in their private sites, but the large media companies also dominate the media industry and highly influence what information gets to the viewers. Back in January, most of the videos that would show if you searched coronavirus or Wuhan were the whistleblower videos from Wuhan. People had copied these videos from the Chinese sites and posted them on YouTube. A great majority of these videos on YouTube got already deleted by the time it became imminent that this outbreak became a pandemic. As a result, many people were unprepared when the lockdowns came. In addition, certain governments and an organization tried to hide the seriousness of this outbreak until the situation got too big to hide. The media companies shouldn't be punished for what they did to their own private sites, but because they're so highly influential, their actions can bring consequences).
Getting somewhat off topic here... if you want to discuss that, take it to the coronavirus thread when the debate room opens next week
And fun and games! My November post was a Christmas ad which ran to Dec 25. I put up a new post for the post holidays, boosted it, and it was rejected. The text read "When Emperor Trajan taps Aulus Galba to lead the first Roman mission to the land of the Han, Aulus expects an easy path to fame and fortune. But the fates have other plans for Senator Aulus Aemilius Galba and his unlikely companions, leading them on an epic journey from the storm-tossed Indian Ocean to the opulent Hanaean court. They must fight for their lives, across the grassy steppes of the wild Xiongnu nomads to the forbidding peaks of the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, looking for the road leading back to Rome," with link to the Amazon site After many, many exchanges, in which I was given the same non-specific or incorrect recommendations, including to select"Special Category" which required me to have political credentials which I did not have, I finally sent them a polite but angry post telling them that I was cease advertising on Facebook unless that ad was approved, or the specific fault with it identified. That got results, four different individuals responded, and identified the offending word as "Senator", although in context he is clearly a Roman Senator. Having lost five days of advertising I deleted his name and changed it to him, and it ran. I did write a very long critique of this in their "How did we do you?" text, and pointing out that human intervention is in fact possible. My wife had a post for Parham's Mill rejected as "Cosmetic procedures and weight loss targeting minors," which was appealed, reviewed and approved in just a few hours, which is as it should be. Apparently humans are not allowed to overrule the software for political ads, however. Sort of like the 737- Max 8 stall preventor which is supposed to help the pilot: the low-slung CFM-56 engines generate a strong pitch-up moment when the power is advanced. However the pilot cannot turn the device off, apparently, nor overrride when it is obviously getting incorrect information and trying to fly the airplane into the ground. Makes me really comfortable with the idea of self-driving cars!
I don't know about Facebook specifically, and I can't tell you how I know about any of it, but more of the social media censorship than you might suspect is being done by English-speaking American (or whichever country you happen to live in) humans, or by people with good VPNs who can convincingly sound American on email and maybe Zoom. The one involving your wife sounds like the work of an organic Winston Smith, not a bot. Granted, these are part-time workers paid minimum wage to scan HUNDREDS of submissions over the course of an eight-hour workday. A lot of them are splitting their attention between actual work and daytrading/gaming/porn/ect, and a lot of them know full well that they're just modern-day Winston Smiths and aren't particularly proud of it. I suspect more than a few hire on with the outright intention of sabotaging the system from within.
Without expressing my own political opinions on the issue, either for or against, I would just point out that, as far as I can tell, the difference between a (large/powerful) private entity and and state-run entity is largely semantic. I haven't used Facebook in almost a decade, and yet I'm pretty sure their corporate shareholders have more power over what information I do and do not have access to than whoever runs the FCC could ever dream.
Facebook are (understandably and rightly) on red alert but in my view have been taking things too far of late. I'm an admin on a group with about 70 people in. The group is about left-of-field, unloved cars. According to Facebook's algorithm (pronounced as Al Gore Rhythm for comedic effect) using the term "I'm not fond of cheap Chinese tyres" is hate speech. I can only think that robots are making decisions, not humans. Surely it's plain to anybody that that post wasn't about hating Chinese people?
Aside from having a Tumblr page, and an old Youtube channel, I'm not on any popular social media sites. I did sign up on Diaspora, which is an obscure alternative to Facebook without all of the issues that makes me avoid FB, and I'm on Bit.tube and Vimeo now for video sharing. I've basically de-Googled myself and started using DuckDuckGo for my search engine, Brave for my browser, and Proton and Tutanota for secure emailing.
I'd love to be able to de-google myself, but popular social media sights, and google are too central for my marketing for me to turn my back on them. Plus, I'm really not tech minded and it's what I know and feel comfortable with. Something I think big tech know keeps people on their platforms.
