Facebook Glitch Crushes Creators, Flips on Ads Without Warning
In the last few weeks, a lot of Facebook pages got crushed, and I experienced series of alarming software glitches that caused me to remove my payment card from my FB ads account. Read on to see if you should do that too.
It started around the 9th of January, when many pages were notified that they would no longer be recommended to new followers. This seriously reduces a page’s reach and also how much money it can make under the FB Creators program.
What Rules?
People started discussing this on Reddit. None of them had been notified of any violations. There was no specific guidance about what rule they’d broken. The View Details button led to a page with no information other than that the page couldn’t be recommended.
They found it was mainly targeting alcohol-related pages, but not exclusively. Archery, martial arts and artisan knife maker pages also got the notification. But so did people in the beauty niche.
Alarming Software Glitches
But for some people, the story began even earlier. Sometime around New Years, some people with alcohol related pages got an email that said “Congratulations!”, their pages would now be recommended to people under 18. It went on to say they’d been smart to request a review – which they hadn’t done.
Then within a couple of weeks came the ban hammer – er, the email about the removal of recommendations. And the next day, I got an email stating they’d suddenly approved quite a few ads to start running for another page, not the one that got de-recommended.
I never asked for those ads to run – they’d just been sitting in my account from previous campaigns. But if I hadn’t caught them quickly, they’d have started running, and I would have been charged. And I would have had no way to talk to anyone at FB about it, or get my bank to dispute it.
So I deleted my payment card. I’ve heard too many stories of people being charged thousands of dollars a month for verification after signing up to pay the normal $14.99 or $29.99 or whatever. There’s something badly wrong going on with FB’s payment system, so I won’t give them anymore payments.
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I don’t know if the same payment system handles user transactions, but I wouldn’t trust any Facebook software at this point. It’s not like they weren’t the glitchiest site on the internet long before they introduced machine learning.
Support? Ha!
FB has no support options for creators, but some people who pay for Meta Verified were able to – wait for it – talk to an AI bot that said nothing could be done. Yes, even when you pay FB, you can’t get support.
I’ve heard stories of people paying hundreds of thousands a year in ads who still can’t get actual support to fix problems. Sure, there’s technically an email for support, but that’s the AI bot mentioned above, and it just apologizes.
One person managed to talk to a human sales agent for ads. The sales agent said it was a huge “AI” glitch, and they’ll have to very slowly fix it manually. But also it seems maybe there are new policies in place that will keep certain topics quashed for good.
I’m using “AI” two ways here, so let me clarify. The AI chat bot is generative AI, which is basically Predictive Text 2.0, programmed to guess (very badly) about what the response to a question should be. The AI the sales agent referred to is actually the machine learning companies like Google and FB have started trusting their whole software operations to.
The problem with machine learning “AI” is that when it gets something wrong, humans can’t fix it. At least not like they did with pure algorithmic software, where you found the bug and corrected it or wrote code to overwrite what the bug was doing wrong. And a company the size of Facebook has no incentive to fix it unless the glitch it hurting their bottom line, anyway.
Crushing Creators and Small Business
This isn’t the first time Facebook has harmed creators. We stopped getting any reach, even with our own followers, years ago. Even if you follow us and like every post, you still won’t be shown every post. Even if you want to.
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They don’t care what users or creators want. Their business goal is to keep you on the platform, so they’ll always be at odds with creators. Unfortunately now Google, Pinterest and everyone else is the same – the sites that acted as a bridge between users and content now functions as a blockade to keep users away from content.
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