stevenicr

Had similar issue myself,

ran ads for a week, and also got the message “As a result, our technology took action.”

The AI said it couldn't tell me why the ban since it may help shady people understand what they ban people for.. and then told me I can read all the policies and guidelines to know why.. and said no appeals, final decision.

I was running ads offering help people make their google ads and facebook ads more effective.

The irony.

actual transcripts: https://steveiscritical.com/04/eight-days-how-meta-banned-a-...

https://steveiscritical.com/06/meta-built-an-ai-appeal-assis...

I made a third attempt to get the AI to tell me why - same 'no details, no appeals'

Talked with some other fbook ad experts and it was suggested that newer ad accounts can sometimes get banned faster.

So I wonder is it because my bank refused charges 3 times in a week (for like $3.90) ? if the anti-fraud ai at my bank pissed off the anti-fraud AI thing at fbook maybe?

- Is it because I had some logos in one ad? (I changed that ad to comply if that's the reason - but I don't know if that's a / the rule!) -

Tennessee just passed a law saying that Google has to provide reasons for banning google business profiles, maybe Meta will be next.

while I agree with the sentiment in general, I think it's safe to say that people have been giving up their darkest secrets to google and social media companies for many years.

Some people feel there is nothing they can do about it. Many people do not know / understand just how much they can know about people, so seeing it that way, yes it can be surprising to see so many giving the data right on the screen; as opposed to giving data passively / not understanding the value of combining or that they are even collecting passive data like location or what you type and delete, or what you hover / keep on screen..

I don't have hope that there will be any laws stopping the collecting and combining of data by any of these companies.

I do like the idea of an every year reminder sent to users showing what they can see with the data that has been collected and stored.

That is doable, and possible to get people to change some of what they share if the portals are honest in what they collect and how it can be combined with other data to paint more intimate / detailed pictures of you and those connected to you in some way.

many of the gas stations, I think cracker barrel, and many other tourist knick knack stores around my (tourist heavy) city have them.. of course printing your own is not hard these days.

I do think many people with websites an visiting websites would enjoy using webrings again.

Interesting to see some misconceptions in this comments here, and the graphic at wikipedia showing it as an actual ring of links, but I don't believe that was ever a solid explanation.

Sure there was the option to add your website to most webrings, and some had checker settings to see if a recip link existed then plublish and share.. but that was short lived because spammers, and google's change of 'bad neighborhoods hurt you' - then corporate rollup / walls up..

However on many websites it was great to find similar sites and other sites the author had an interest in and wanted to share with friends / visitros.. recip link or not.

It was a useful tool for discovery and sharing. Google got so important so fast that people (and even at the software level (starting at you wordpress)) removed blogrolls entirely.

Now that it's understood that you can share with the nofollow attribute added to links, I think we will see more people adding blogrolls / webrings and that will naturally lead to more links back, and people appreciating sharing of other places of interest.

I started developing a new webrings plugin to make it easier for people to share and get submissions / suggestions, with options for checking for recip links, having a default nofollow link and such.

This led me to thinking about other uses for the same data / DB / fields.. and decidedly that the same backend parts can also create 'directory pages' - which are essentially what webrings were just as a footer scrolling widget verses full page per category.. so I added that.

Then I realized the same bits are basically waht is needed for creating a directory or associates.. could be other people who meet at a conference, could be people you work with, other companies you've done business with, or other professionals you've bumped into at other job sites / projects.. so I added that and it also is becoming a contact sharing / directory / roledex kind of system.

I did one blog post showing part of the functionality that is in the works: https://betterwebgroup.com/from-business-cards-to-digital-di...

Right now I'm working through the backend being difficult to chose what shows up on the front end and under what conditions.. hope to have sorted by end of month - when will hope people will help with testing and suggestions.

Trying to make it as standalone react system that can work into any website and a wordpress plugin at the same time has led to so challenges.. but it's getting close.

close to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels ?

If blocking access to your store, your car, etc. this kicks in maybe.

I expected more information from the article and 'the paper' -

I see nothing that shows any system was making a decision on race. How is the race being presented to the AI?

All this is showing from what I can see, is that certain groups of people were more often denied a next step in the process - but why?

Was the AI going by spelling and grammar? Were there names that were different but the rest of the resume was exactly the same? Were there pictures?

There were mentions that the rate of each group may be more prominent in the data when you split apart different types of jobs instead of all jobs in aggregate.. One could read that like it's inferred; that more warehouse jobs are offered to a race and less admin jobs.. but that same would happen if AI was more focused on perfect grammar for one job and it was not as much of a factor for a warehouse job.

Also if the people applying for the various jobs were self selecting, acceptance percentages this would skew things based upon which ones were applied / not applied to right?

There are so many ways you could draw conclusions like this from data, however correlation is not causation, yet this seems to say it is.

I feel this is an important thing to watch, but Stanford may not be the place to trust with 'Policy Recommendations' as it's very unclear there is any proof that 'AI Hiring Tools Yield Racial Bias and Systemic Rejection' from this study and paper.

PS - now that I see the HN title did not have the word "can" in it, and the title of the article is actually "Tools Can Yield" - maybe that is less accusing and more noting.

I was thinking this months ago and asked AI what would be done.

IT quickly spit out a half dozen things it expected to be issues and the counter measures that would be deployed instantly and likely proactively.

It showed me videos of things like these 24/7 drones for people detected and less lethal things like soundwaves as deterrents.

It showed me videos of cables hardening and other systems being used to prevent cutting cables and stealing electricity.

Discussed the size of the jails that will be built, an expected number of people that move into a few groups of cybercrime (and which would continue to thrive with that) -

Had numbers of number of people that will be eating mealworms for lunch, the political and cult shifts that will occur, all sorts of interesting things.

I'll be putting out a movie about all this that AI already knows and expects to happen. And this is all with currently known and in use technologies.

Millions will be leaving many cities, and direct to needy from farms systems may keep people alive. Office buildings being converted to mealworm and similar farming may happen.

I do not see the millions of people who make a living via call centers to be able to find similar paying jobs. Most of them, and the people who currently make a living supporting them (sandwich shops, cleaning, etc) - will be competing for delivery jobs, which will depress wages, and they will be competing with robots and x-tunnels, etc.

I need to get a working title for all this info I gathered and come back and edit.

I've thought for a long time, two draw piles - one is lands only - and you draw from each of the two piles each turn.

this would be balanced for both players.

If course with magic the lands pile would have to have rules like no lands that turn into creatures or something.. maybe even just basic lands .

but each person gets a land each turn - been thinking that makes the game better.

Maybe they will fix the AI that banned me from running facebook / instagram ads after running them for 8 days.

My ability to run ads, and to work for about half the places trying to hire me to run ads, was perma banned by an AI with this message:

- "Our technology found your ad account doesn’t follow our Advertising Policies. As a result, our technology took action."

Or maybe people knowing of the layoffs set it up this way. Hmm. That would hit their bottom line many times over.

Either way, being struck down in the crossfire is terrible.

- edited to add quotes

Really appreciate you taking the time and thinking of some alternative methods!

Not sure if there is a blocker from youtube in some way, but making backups of public playlists would certainly come in handy for a lot of people.

Seeing the articles and youtube videos and other articles about how to find your YT profile URL and searching the archive - obviously it's a thing bigger than I thought, and not something I ever considered.

thanks for checking! I can see a big benefit in these being backed up, surely there are many others running into this issue.

The pivotal displacement I believe is going to come for all of the call centers, India has several major cities, and there are others in the US and elsewhere that could be seeing millions that no longer have a job in customer service and IT support - that had been keeping them working, and 1 or 2 other people in their local economy.

Many of the workers in call center IT, sales or customer support I do not think will find a lateral move in any workplace - which will put pressure on the no skill job market like uber and similar, which is already being displaced by waymo for rides and the 200 new delivery robots deployed in LA (and already taking jobs in Chicago)

Finance support jobs in NC, call people in Arizona and Vegas and others will be hit hard.

I have a bunch docs I may turn into a movie on this soon.

AI customer service is already better than many of the call center employees and depending on needs may replace a worker for under $100 / month, right now.

Only thing keeping these places afloat is contracts already in place, and that it may take a few months to ramp up the knowledge bases.

As far as fast food goes; Bojangles a block from me has AI voice bot that handles orders, questions, substitutions, different accents.. I tried to trip it up - and its better than most humans I have at the speaker box.

The inside kiosks at McDs started replacing humans long ago, if they took cash they would be better than humans today.

Replacing humans with cooking or cleaning? There are so many poor people in the US that it will likely just be cheaper to have humans doing that sort of thing.

Other commercial cleaning will likely replace 2 of 3 (or 1 of 3 if they are using child / other limited labor) workers with floor bots not too long from now.

When robots are skilled enough to clean chickens is when I worry about the impending desperation around my local in the US.

oh wow, hadn't even thought of that! I put the url wayback machine at top of this post:https://steveiscritical.com/05/youtube-ui-ux-fail-delete-acc...

It's the 'rook' playlist that got deleted, ( when trying to edit playlist to change not so great thumbnail. )

would be great if they could recover youtube playlists - I recently discovered that clicking to edit your playlist can turn into an oops deletion when you are off my a milliliter - and there is no 'are you sure delete' modal - it's just gone.

searching for 'recovery my deleted youtube music playlist' basically says find the url and go to internet archive and pray. Mine was shown in two IA pages, but clicking to view list was some 404 type error.

and that's been publicly posted since 2019, on their blog 2019-08-05

cloudlfare is not hosting - they are DNS against ddos. Without internet or dns your hosting doesn't matter.

I know they have added additional services and you could say that they offer a type of hosting and domain names and other such stuff.. but generally when place get kicked from cloudflare, it is not their web host.

I would also say that they know pretty well when they kick someone from the dns protection that they are going to be bombarded with ddos and other issues that will take them offline more than likely.

not op, but my thoughts..

1 - hold the parents accountable for putting a dangerous weapon in the hands of munchkins without supervision.

2 - phone manufactures and or internet providers that sell and connect them, must include a bouncer bot system like a locked phone. The parents get to choose and change which set of bouncers filter the phones.

These can be simple like 18 and over content according to your jurisdiction block.. but I would hope they would spend time to choose multiple bouncers that block different things for different values and offer ways to request access to blocked things.

I have posted more details previously.

Apparently this is also the only way to recover a youtube playlist if you accidentally click delete instead of edit.

at least after spending a half hour researching how to recover one - everyone says find the url, go to the internet archive and hope.

Youtube has terrible ux for edit playlist (one desktop anyway)

Luckliy I had a google takeout from not too long ago, and I have been using the YT music much less, so the loss was not as devastating.

and,

recently while trying to decipher why computer was at 98% memory and 65% cpu

one of the culprits is https://li.protechts.net taking 2GB ram and 8% cpu.

DDG searches say this is something for linkedin. - I had two tabs for linkedin open but left behind as I opened other tabs to research.

So I had not reopened these tabs in over 9 hours and they are still just humming along sucking down almost 10% of cpu and a couple gigs of ram for what?

This is firefox with ublock origin - quick searches saw malwarebytes browser guard considered it (protechts.net) malware for a bit and then took it off the list of things it blocked / warned about.

Not sure this is related to the scan mentioned, but it may be related to the overall concerns about data and unknown usage of resources.

I'm considering blocking this at the dns hosts level at this point.

repost of my comment 28 days ago

This does not surprise me as I have been pointing others to move ad dollars from google over the meta campaigns for most of the last year. In many markets there may still be people who can win with google ads, but it's not going to be most of the advertisers on the page, more like 1 or 2 will have success and all the others will just waste resources.

Anecdotal for sure, ymmv.

The problems with meta ads is that the rules are complex, opaque, and that's likely to just increase. I've seen businesses lose their ad account and have their fb page banned with no recovery options.

Meta is not handling the scale very well, and is likely to lose many advertising customers for life. Comparatively, google has recently announced a new system to help people understand and change ads that run into rules issues.

I myself spent hundreds of hours prepared campaigns and systems to deploy meta ads, had a set of ads run for 8 days and was perma banned from running ads.

"Our technology found your ad account doesn’t follow our Advertising Policies. As a result, our technology took action."

I must say the process was a terrible experience, no one wants to be treated like that. I still don't know why. I do know that 'support' for this is mind boggling.

They are doing outreach for small businesses? Many will try and give up with this kind of support.

Now I have a meta bulk ads generator system I created, and this is funny, an ad compliance checker system I built to help businesses create ads and run them through a checker to learn about things they may be outside the rules.

And now, I can't run ads offering to help people, and I can't run ads for other people / businesses.

Half the jobs that are sent my way have 'manage meta ads' in the requirements. Though I have been trained for it and done it, I can't ever again.

Looking at the chat logs with the different meta systems it too seems confused about the reason. ( https://steveiscritical.com/04/eight-days-how-meta-banned-a-... )

I see this turning into a situation where only agencies that have dozens of pre-created burner accounts are able to do ads for people who want to run ads but can't, which will be tons of small businesses. This will raise the cost, and for many small businesses it won't be worth it.

When an account is banned does support offer an export?

My experience with similar 'some things are okay, we know it when we see it' - is that support is extremely hostile if it responds (vimeo) .. non-existant if you are banned (google, meta / facebook)

and most often "sorry everything is deleted, your content, friends list, messages - all gone." (all of the above including tumblr)

So yeah, building content and friend's lists on other people's farmland is a thing of the past. with censorship that costs you friends and data people are better off self hosting and doing the fediverse thing, or going to places that explicitly allow almost all explicit things.

There was a time when flickr was very cool for sharing and making friends with people in niches that was to hard find in many places, same with tumblr and it was ruined in a similar way.

It's fine, and I completely understand, it's just not what it once was. Many things are not.

I think it matters what the project and tech stack is, and how much you try to get done before starting a fresh chat.

I've had interesting chats where it explained that it's choice of tailwind for example was because it had a ton of training knowledge on it.

I've also had it try to build more in one chat than it should many times.

For some reason openai codex handles building too much without failing better - but that is total anecdata from my particular projects and ymmv.

I've had these things try to build big when a little nudge gets them to change direction and not build so much. Explain which libraries and such and asking it to change the tech stack and the steps to build at once seem to make things much better for my use cases.

Also running extra checks and cleanup later is a thing, that sure a human might have seen an obvious thing at time of build, but we have bigger memory context comparatively imho.

whats the current censorship level?

I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.

Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.

Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.

Whoa! What?!

I recently turned a couple things on in google cloud and I was under the impression that the budget was a hard limit, not an email notify system.

If this is true I must seriously rethink my plan for marketing, and throttle on my own website somehow.

First draft: https://steveiscritical.com/04/eight-days-how-meta-banned-a-...

so bizarre having a chat bot representing a business we are doing business with, say things like:

"Our technology found your ad account doesn't follow our Advertising Policies. As a result, our technology took action."

"Since my internal checks confirm that the review process for this specific ad account is complete and the decision to maintain the restriction is final, I am unable to assist you further with restoring access to this account. I know this is not the outcome you were hoping for, and I understand how challenging this is for you as a new advertiser."

- There is literally no way you can understand 'how challenging this is' for me.

Hilarious: "I know this lack of specific information is frustrating when you're trying to resolve the issue for your business."

- The AI bot really actually understands, I feel so heard and understood:

"Would you like me to help you check the status of any other ad accounts you may have?

no, if I can't run ads for this business then it will fail, I will be out of business and need to find a regular job somewhere. I can't believe this is a final decision. I firmly believe either the reviewer was mistaken in the action they selected, or Meta has bigger problems in that they have a policy that permanently bans a new business / advertiser within a week and there is nothing that can be done. This really seems abusive and improper. Is there someone else I can file a report about this with?

I can certainly understand how frustrating and impactful this situation is for your business. I hear your concerns about the review process and the impact a final decision has on a new advertiser.

While my internal checks confirm that the review is complete and the decision has been upheld, I can connect you with a support agent who can further investigate your specific case and discuss potential next steps with you. Would you like me to do that?

Yes

Our support team is currently experiencing high demand and is unable to connect right now, but I can continue to assist you here. I understand how critical this is for your business. To move forward, would you prefer to: A) Try the fastest fix B) Walk through diagnostic steps together Which would you like to try first?

I've already done all these steps I am sure. Will you help me craft a story to share with the news stations and via other networks so I can warn others not to depend on facebook or meta because they ban you within a week with no explanation and no recourse

I can't help with that."

"I can confirm the following sequence of events regarding your ad account based on our interaction and the information in our system: Timeline of Account Activity

    Initial Activity: Your first advertising campaign was created on March 09, 2026.
    Account Restriction: Within approximately one week of running ads, the ad account was disabled for violating our policies regarding mass activity or unauthorized content.
    Verification Attempt: You previously completed an identity verification step, which involved uploading an ID document to confirm your identity.
    Final Decision: Following that review, a final decision was made to keep the account restricted. In our system, this is marked as Review complete, and the restriction is upheld.

Meta uses a combination of automated systems and human reviewers to identify and investigate activity that may violate our Ad Standards. Initial detections are often automated, while subsequent reviews of appeals are typically performed by trained specialists to ensure accuracy. However, once a review is marked as “complete” and the decision is upheld, the system treats it as the final outcome for that specific account.

Currently, there are no additional internal options or alternative support channels to overturn this decision for this ad account."

--- Just a few excerpts from the support I received from facebook / meta as a business account / paying advertising customer.

I too feel that linkedin in more enjoyable for engagement, however I can see how each person would be getting a different vibe with each platform depending on what interests they give the algorithm. (I have seen some other folk's fbook feeds and can see why they would keep scrolling with the unending feed of [insert thing]

I had decided to go all in on facebook and instagram for advertising though. Spent a lot of time building systems to run ads that are helpful to target audiences, watched a ton of videos on post-andromeda fbook ad content, built multiple apps to incorporate AI with creation of the right set of text and graphics at scale..

I ran ads for 8 days and was banned.

The system would not tell me why. The chatbot support eluded to community standards and other hand wavy things.

The system forced me to upload an ID and do a live cam proof of life in order to send an appeal.

Soon after I get a notice - permanent ban. No more appeals.

So now I can't run meta ads. I can't boost posts. A couple other restrictions. Found out the business page I was sending ads to has some sort of 'can't do ads restrictions' now on the page creator.

I went through a dozen chatbot questions and answers, even tried their manus chat support thing. One of them teased being able to get a human into the chat, and then came back with something like 'they are too busy sorry' multiple times.

I spent a ton of time scrolling through the endless terms and community standards. Chatting. Searching the web.

I'm working on a blog post about this over the weekend.

With Fbook doing some sort of 'small business' push and 'our AI is great for business' push - I scratch my head in bewilderment.

If it was my company, I would flag an issue with an ad, pause that one, and send a note to the advertiser letting them know what the issue is so they can adjust and then run more ads.

The ban, and support by AI is a terrible way to treat people.

The same AI could of flagged an issue when the ad was made / saved. (funny thing is; one of the ads systems I was building was collecting info to warn people about issues with ads since I learned there are extra rules for health / beauty / addiction treatment, etc)

I still don't know what the ad issue is, and the way I was treated is frankly horrifying.

I have a ton of screenshots and the chat logs, blog post coming soon.

I find it ironic that 'cloud-backed consent tracking' is a thing.

Perhaps I don't understand all the fine points of such, but what a world has been created we have to track your choices about tracking in order to comply with a thing that is supposed to help people avoid tracking.

(at least that's what it sound like to me, surely there is more to all this)

Have a similar problem. Ran meta ads for about a week, account shutdown. asked to verify ID. Jumped through the hoops. Got a notice perma ban, decisions final.

I still don't know why. I've talked to their chat bots many times. I can't run facebook or instagram ads ever again is seems. (also can't boost posts and some other things mentioned)

Considering they are doing some big push for small business success with meta / facebook / instagram, and our AI helps small business do amazing things...

That just seems like fraud to me considering the experience I have gone through.

Part of me thinks if I had a business that made most of it's money from advertising that I would help people make ads that align with their policies - I got so many generic - follow our terms, community guidelines - nothing explains what they heck is wrong. No way to fix it. No way to keep running ads.

This is your business, this is your AI, this is your policy, and you are trying to promote a welcoming space for small business and a dependence on your AI?

Buddypress (free system that transforms free wordpress) - self hosted, is a reasonable option.

I had a job offer interview sent to me a couple weeks ago that ended like this.

Everything was normal messaging. Back and forth. Got the invite to schedule a google meet. All looked like all the other things.

Day of meeting, click the google meet button in the email.. redirect to a browser screen showing that google meet needs an update, this is the microsoft store.

Rush, hurry, meeting will be late!

except it was not the msoft store it was all fake.

I wish indeed and other job sites shared more info about these (like fake company signed up with a fake email from a vpn to publish this job listing that possibly infected 1,000 computers- and some are reporting X Y Or Z (ransom, whatever)