It’s dangerous doing business with Facebook
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I never in a million years thought that trying to sell t-shirts online would result in being perma-banned from Facebook and potentially losing access to dozens of online services that I use on a daily basis.
I’m a car fan, I usually keep that to myself, it’s a personal hobby, I enjoy all things automotive. I love the opportunity for people to express their personal design and aesthetics and seeing people realize their vision for how they feel a particular car should look or perform. JDM, American, KDM, Euro, from Time Attack and Rat Rods to Street style, I love it all.
Turbocharged cars always capture my attention. In the mid-90’s I remember seeing an article expounding on the abilities of the Mitsubishi Eclipse (Eagle Talon and Plymouth Laser) and how that car works it’s magic with a little 2.0L Turbo 4-cylinder and All Wheel Drive. Eventually I went on to own a list of JDM, Euro and KDM cars including a 1998 Eagle Talon TSi AWD, 1993 FD RX7, 2004 Subaru WRX, 2010 VW GTi, a 1990 Nissan 300zx that I had for 20 years, and a 2019 Kia Stinger Limited 3.3TT AWD (GT2 for my US readers).
I’ve made a career of Customer Experience Management, with a focus on software engineering, an emphasis on the end user, and vocal about user experience. Customer Experience Management is a (relatively) new approach to thinking about how to enable, support and engage customers through their journey interacting with a brand or business, and it aligns well with both my technical background and desire to better understand customer needs at scale.
I recently decided to marry the two, and over the past couple of weeks I started a new Instagram account to share some of the amazing content there with the rest of the community with a focus on some of the wild projects out there, focusing on turbocharged engines. This isn’t a new thing, there are many accounts, accounts that I follow, that do the same thing. I also had some ideas for cool shirts that I’d like to wear myself, ideas for work and street wear that would let people “wear their heart on their sleeve” so to speak.
So I designed my own logo, and worked with a few designers to come up with some designs for shirts that captured what I was looking for, set up a Shopify account, and all of my favourite, free CXM tools (Facebook Pixels, Hub Spot, Google Analytics and Tag Manager to name a few), and got them integrated. And this is something I’m doing for fun, on the side, so I also don’t want to worry about logistics, fulfilment and shipping, so I’m working with a couple of print on demand companies that will drop ship products to my customers.
Having everything in place and a minimum amount of content, I launched Turbo Fanclub quietly so that I could validate my analytics and commerce funnel so that I could confirm that I’m getting the conversion metrics that I covet as a CXM enthusiast.
With a store up and running, a few products to choose from and ready to collect analytics, it was time to promote some posts from my Turbo Fanclub Instagram account. I had already run a quick promotion test with my personal account to make sure I understood the process, ran it for a couple of days and shut it down once I knew it was working, but now it was prime time.
I created a post with one of my hoodies, and created a discount code to support the launch of my site “WELCOME15” to give people 15% off on orders over $50, and created a promotion. It was instantaneously and automatically rejected as a scam. Well, that’s clearly a mistake, I’m just trying to sell a hoodie. Thankfully, the Instagram app allows appealing the rejection directly in the application, however, submitting the appeal resulted in an error.
Frustrating as that may be, I can also see my promotions in Facebook Ads Manager, however, upon logging in, my account was disabled. Rather than just appealing the rejected promotion, I appealed the disablement of my account, and within 24 hours I received an automated message with an apology for the block, my account was re-enabled, good to go! With that out of the way, I expect that I should be good to promote my posts now, whatever it was was worked out.
I created another promotion of the same post. Again, immediately rejected, appeals in-app result in errors, Ads Manager account disabled, and I need to appeal again. 24 hours later, another automated message (identical to the first), and my account is re-enabled. This was only about a week ago, I haven’t had time to try promoting a post again.
Yesterday, I thought I’d try again to promote a post, this time I thought I’d do it directly from Ads Manager to see if I’d get a different result. I’ve already gone over my account several times with a fine toothed comb, adding my corporation information, business number, personal contact information anywhere that might have been missed, this is a legit operation, I’ve already been rejected twice without any feedback or reasoning why my post was flagged.
My personal Facebook account is locked.
I can’t access any Facebook services across anything I might have been doing with Facebook. I have apps that I’ve developed that allow socially federated authentication with Facebook with Client ID’s, I can’t access personal features of Facebook or continue conversations that I was having on some local boards, I certainly can’t access Facebook Business, Facebook Support (what exists of it), or Facebook Ads Manager.
After my experience with the initial promotion issues, I found Redditors lament similar promotion issues, just create a new account, and try promoting again. Every new account I try to create is auto banned. I tried another personal email address, I tried an email address from Turbofan Club, I even tried my work address, each one immediately results in “Your Account Has Been Disabled”. I could signing up with false information, via a VPN, and I’m sure I could find a way to circumvent this, but I’m trying to do this all above board, I would be exactly the type of person they’re actually trying to block.
After requesting a review, I get a message that states “Sorry, but we’ll probably never review your account”
So that’s my story to date. I’m probably banned from Facebook for life for trying to sell some t-shirts online, all of my personal interactions, applications I’ve developed, all permanently locked with no recourse, and whether or not those other uses of Facebook were related to promoting posts to sell t-shirts or not. Facebook has a “No Support” policy.
Thankfully I have only ever used Google for social federation otherwise I would be locked out of potentially dozens or even hundreds of other services that rely on Facebook for social federation. I could have been locked out of everything I’ve ever done online.
Clearly I’ve been flagged by a machine learning algorithm, the 24 hour response is more than likely an automated workflow to handle an appeal of that sort and no humans have likely been involved in this processes, and at this point I have no way of appealing the decision.
