‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’âPaul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)
You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what canât you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their ads.
Thatâs exactly what happened to Signal when it attempted to run ads on Instagram that illustrated the targeting.
I donât believe thereâs anything in their T&Cs that disallow this, but Facebook has never been about those. You can breach them as much as you like with running scripts and creating bots, after all. One bastard streamed a massacre on March 15, 2019, which was accessible for some time afterwards; and a year later, eight copies were still on the platform. Facebook âenforcesâ what it wants to, and that includes disabling accounts that show just how invasive they are.
Iâve already had a taste of this after I began deleting my ad preferences and exposing how terrible they were. And they probably didnât like my pointing out that they were collecting those preferences long after I had opted out of their ad targeting (at a time when their own site suggested that opting out meant just that). Now that feature is gone for me.
Itâs what Facebook does. It lies, and even uses those lies to plant software on your computers that never show up in your programsâ list. And, like Google, the timing of when ad accounts are disabled is interesting: it’s not the first time this took place right after you do something that reveals some hard truths about them.
Personally, I believe Facebookâs preferences are a joke, so Signal may have found their ad account cancelled not because they reminded everyone that the conjurer had a trick, but just how lousy the trick really was. Imagine getting one of these ads and thinking, âThat ainât me at all.â That would get certain Facebook advertisers thinking twiceâthat is, those who give Facebookâs many bots a pass, and donât mind that Instagram is 45 per cent bot, 55 per cent human, and donât mind that their demographic estimates have no basis in reality. I mean, weâre already talking quite a gullible bunch who are doing an activity thatâs marginally above setting fire to banknotes in terms of monetary utility, or donating to Jeb Bushâs presidential tilt in 2016.
Facebook wants to keep as many of them as possible, and theyâre taking no chances. You just never know where the tipping point is, when the masses finally decide to jump ship.