When will Facebook stop killing small businesses with its ban AI?
On the morning of October 13th, cruising towards a record-breaking month of growth for my startup, our ambitions were suddenly crushed.
As I opened up my Facebook Advertising Manager, I was greeted with the one word every entrepreneur dreads…
“Restricted.”
Our ability to advertise on Facebook and Instagram was gone.
Our only option? Click a button to “request a review”.
Oh, and due to COVID-19 a response could take “several weeks”.
Just like that, a customer acquisition channel that we rely on to fuel growth, create jobs, and mail out paychecks — dead.
No reason given. No recourse.
No specific “Advertising Policy” that we’re in violation of.
No one to even ask for help.
What I didn’t realize at the time, was that our story is far from unusual.
If you’re a startup founder, a small business owner or marketer of any kind, then you’ve probably already heard firsthand about the recent unprecedented “carpet bomb bans” of advertising accounts during the run-up to the US presidential election.
But, it doesn’t stop there…
We contacted hundreds of small business owners, and even got in touch with a senior exec at Facebook looking for answers.
What we found is that Facebook’s algorithmically determined, zero-warning bans are sweeping the legs out from under thousands of entrepreneurs and small teams.
All. The. Time.
It’s killing small businesses, it’s hurting innovation, and it raises questions about the role Facebook has in the global economy.
Facebook can — and should — do better.
Why am I freaking out about this? Let’s take a step back…
I’m a startup founder — I built Commit Action to help small business owners become the most focused, effective versions of themselves possible.
I’m also a venture partner over at Human Ventures, an NYC based VC fund and startup builder that has brought some amazingly innovative ideas to market, in addition to backing Commit Action last year.
This position gives me a unique insight into the huge responsibility Facebook holds over early-stage startups, and owner/operator small businesses, and the terrible impact their merciless ban hammer can have on both.
Here’s how it works…
Seed-stage startups have an interesting challenge: They have to prove that a huge market exists for their innovative new idea. A team, a dream, and a pitch deck only gets them so far.
They have to demonstrably turn strangers into customers to secure the investor confidence and capital they need to ultimately win.
Facebook is so ubiquitous that — for better or for worse — the “go to market” strategy of almost every seed-stage venture is to run a bunch of creative ad tests on either Facebook or Instagram.
Now, no business should be “single channel dependent” but many have to be, at least temporarily, as they ramp up to bigger, broader marketing campaigns.
Facebook and Instagram are the de facto place to begin.
I’ve advised across the Human Ventures portfolio, shared best practices and learnings from Commit Action’s own marketing journey, and tried my best to help out as these founders launch early advertising to find their audiences.
A seed-stage company — whether it’s an organic baby food as a service, a primary care health startup for POC or a novel plant based protein company — has a short runway to prove itself and the lure of Facebook ads to power that sprint to viability, is simple:
Facebook offers a startup low-cost ad experiments that can reach deeply specific affinity groups of strangers. It makes it easy to put ads in front of the right eyeballs to tell folks about something new. And — if successful — those ads could ultimately scale to millions.
As a founder, you’d be crazy not to start with Facebook. Everyone is on these platforms. You can’t build a business without being where the people are.
Which brings me to small businesses…
A passionate business owner, with a creative mindset, can set up ultra-targeted low budget campaigns to build their brand and bring customers through the door.
Facebook gives a small town florist or dog walker the ability to buy advertising alongside Target and Toyota, and their brilliant system allows all parties to do so profitably! If the demand is there and the ad is engaging, it can work for anyone.
For the mom-and-pop companies that will never scale to national TV campaigns, that service niches much too narrow for even billboards to be viable, Facebook is a way to invest a small percentage of bootstrapped profits back into growth.
Spending $50 a day on ads can be just the boost an entrepreneur needs to build a sustainable business that was struggling on word-of-mouth alone.
Facebook knows looking after small business is crucial, especially as they navigate through this dumpster fire of a year.
That’s why Sheryl Sandberg has been doubling down on small business support, and urging Congress to do the same. Right?
That’s why Facebook has launched a “Season of Support” to help small businesses in Q4 of this year. Right?
That’s why they’ve even gotten into a PR scrap with Apple where they’re positioning themselves as champion to the little guy. Right?
That’s why they’ve dropped a feel good line about small business and community on their twitter page.
That heart icon seems pretty friendly, so naturally I wanted to see if perhaps our experience was an anomaly. Was all this talk of supporting small businesses real, or was it just empty PR?
I wanted to talk to real humans.
So, on Monday, twiddling my thumbs in ban purgatory, I emailed every single Commit Action customer with a simple question.
How had they been affected by Facebook’s recent bans?
The response was overwhelming, and frankly, worrying.
Within minutes of my email going out, I was inundated with small business owners and scrappy founders. All in the same boat.
And there was a common theme: People were in the dark. They didn’t know what they’d done, they didn’t know how to fix it, and they’d heard NOTHING from Facebook.
If they’d done something wrong, it was a mistake and they wanted to fix it.
But they couldn’t.
Across the board, it seems this is one strike and you’re out. No explanation.
Facebook’s guidelines don’t mention the criteria their AI uses to make banning decisions.
No one knows how to be compliant.
No one knows what the AI wants.
If you scroll the message boards discussing this stuff, these entrepreneurs sound downright superstitious. Like medieval serfs consulting tea leaves to figure out when the next famine might strike.
In an attempt to get some answers, I leveraged a personal connection to reach out to a senior VP at Facebook.
I just wanted to better understand what was going on.
I was told in no uncertain terms that no one senior at Facebook has any time for me, or the petty concerns of my business (and our customers).
We’ve been told that everyone is pulling all-nighters at Facebook HQ to combat disinformation. They’re understandably trying to avoid the chaos their platform created… four years ago.
So what we have here is a public company operating at such a massive scale that it is crying “we’re stuck!”
Working overtime to combat the political impact of bad actors on the platform means that — simultaneously — they’re incapable of stopping being a bad actor themselves. Facebook would have us believe that hurting customer’s livelihoods is the only option.
Our company and thousands of other small businesses and startups are just collateral damage in the broader project of Facebook profitably navigating the election.
And I think the truth is that even Facebook employees don’t fully understand their own algorithms.
Here’s the email Commit Action’s “account manager” at Facebook sent to compliance on our behalf.
It’s like this person doesn’t even work there.
Here’s why (and how) Facebook should do better
Advertising with Facebook has allowed my team and I to broadcast our mission and message:
That human connection is what small business owners need to beat the isolation blues that otherwise rob them of clarity, productivity, and growth.
And it’s that message of human connection we want to reiterate to Facebook now, as a real solution for supporting small businesses.
Human connection is the future. The problem is that Facebook has shown zero interest in applying humanity here.
Metaphorically, or literally.
The AI powering these bans appears to run on the same machine learning principles that have caused all manner of ridiculous, nonsensically biased outcomes.
Facebook is being machine unintelligent in much the same way Microsoft’s chatbot learned to be a neo-nazi or that various computer vision algorithms struggle to recognize black faces.
This time it’s entrepreneurs and small business revenue being hurt.
The solution — as we’ve known all along at Commit Action — is human connection.
A human can see that the local bake shop or HVAC installer running clever ads is not an election misinformation source.
A human can see that Commit Action’s clumsy productivity memes are only meant to pretend we’re hip, make our followers laugh and consider signing up for a personal trainer for productivity.
A human could also see that my friend Adriaan’s boutique recruiting startup — yet another I heard from this week — isn’t some dodgy website that deserves to be outside the scope of Facebook’s advertising guidelines:
His actual website URL has been permanently banned from Facebook, entirely, by the AI gatekeeper.
If I were to guess, matchr.io is too pattern-recognizably close to a dating website name for the algorithm, despite just being a pretty good pun and great brand for a fantastic recruiting company! Adriaan cannot advertise or even participate professionally on these platforms. At all.
Oh and he has “never ever” been able to reach a human at Facebook to get the AI gatekeeper’s decision reconsidered.
These were just a few examples where a human being at Facebook could help a well meaning startup or small business grow, versus letting an unchecked AI blindly wipe them out.
Facebook could spend some of the $5 billion in net earnings it enjoyed in just Q2 of this year — yes, during those pandemic months while small businesses were shuttering across the nation — to hire real human beings to augment it’s discriminatory and destructive AI.
If Facebook really cares about small businesses, it should stop banning them.
Instead, why not hire humans? Why not empower Facebook staff to connect with Facebook’s advertising customers to help those customers grow?
That way, everyone wins.
I founded a company on the idea and power of scaling human connection. So did Zuckerberg.
I’m down to help. I hope he is too.
So let’s talk. (I mean it. Please DM me Facebook. I want to help.)
If you or anyone you know has been affected by Facebook’s merciless small business banning, please give this article every 👏 you can and share it. Visibility will help this systemic issue get fixed.
