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

lerner.co.il

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

#71
post #50
post #47

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 A…

Yeah exactly. Imagine if our laws worked like that. Complete dystopia.

There is a book on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

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

#74
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.

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

#75

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 a…

People prepared to commit fraud may get good ROI; many legitimate business get terible ROI anyway.

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

#76
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.

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

#77
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually banning everyone is a good way to condensate spammers and scammers who will just set up a new company from time to time anyways. I haven't thought about this before, but it could explain some of the degeneration of ads over time I have been noticing.

My immediate thought when speed reading the blog post was "just create an advertisement company, have yourself as a client and call it a day". Sometimes we gotta fight stupid with stupid, you know?

There are plenty of ad networks. It is just that they pay like 1/10th of what Google does to the site showing ads.

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

#79
post #47

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 A…

To be somewhat fair to Meta; the "violation of unclear rules part" part is an appropriate response for spam detection.

Usually any entity dealing with the web don't want to reveal how their spam detector works because doing so could in turn reveal information on how to circumvent it[0].

The issue is that Meta thinks they're large enough that they can apply this to every single one of their business customers and all other parts of their policy as well - normally a company will be inclined to keep the businesses it's partnered with happy because losing their business can have a knock-on effect that could result in a bigger knock-on effect.

The sad thing is that Meta is probably correct in this assessment - losing one business wouldn't hurt them, regardless of spending. Even if you put a few thousand a month on the line, it's not worth for them to consider you. Heck even if you tell your friends about it - Meta doesn't give a shit.

The true Kafka-esque nightmare here though is that even just knowing someone at the company is apparently not even enough to get it properly checked out and fixed (even corporations like Google who have similar black box policies to most users have the means to do that). It seems Facebook runs on "computer says no" logic when it comes to cases they don't have data on anymore. That is truly disgusting.

[0]: This in part because most spam detection is ultimately still just checking heuristics; revealing the heuristic simply reveals what stat to adjust for. There's very few "sophisticated" detection methods - even the big email providers still just rely on heuristics combined with an internal trust score that they gain by checking how users respond to email.

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

#80
post #50
post #47

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 A…

Yeah exactly. Imagine if our laws worked like that. Complete dystopia.

if u think about it - laws that govern lives today, are predominantly these rules of the information systems. these rules impact us more than the laws governed by the judiciary. so we ARE in this complete dystopia, question is whether we'll see any sort of uprising or dark IT ages are just beginning...
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