One digital marketer, Chris Raines, was setting up an
advertising campaign on Facebook last week when his account abruptly stopped
working. Raines uses his account to manage ads for clients' Facebook Pages.
Without it, he couldn't do his job.
The lockout was a nuisance, but then Raines noticed
something more concerning: A $3,000 per-day ad campaign that he'd set up for a
client before his account was locked continued to run even though he could no
longer manage it. Raines was spending his client's money without any way to
control how.
Raines tried to confirm his identity using Facebook's
automated systems, but received an error message. Eventually, he called the
advertiser and asked if they would make his wife an administrator to the company-owned
Facebook Page. Using her account, he was finally able to log in and manage the
Facebook advertisements, which includes adjusting details like who sees the
advertisement and how much to spend.
“The actual injury, especially for advertisers and
marketers, is immense,” said Raines, who runs a digital media company called
Bullhorn Media. “Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went
away.”
As he investigated solutions, Raines started hearing about
other ad buyers in the same position. Harrison Kugler, an independent digital
media manager in New Jersey, was similarly locked out while running
advertisements for his client, a local comedy club. It took him 26 hours to get
his account back, during which he estimates he spent $200 in Facebook
advertisements without his usual level of oversight. In New Zealand, marketing
consultant Sam Frost was frozen out of his account, and there were no other
administrators linked to some of the Facebook Pages running the advertisements.
He spent “a couple hundred dollars” before he was allowed back in.
“It's not a king's ransom, but it's more the fact that to
some businesses that might be a huge amount of money,” Frost says. “I don't see
any other business that would be able to get away with it.”
As Facebook has increasingly relied on automated tools to
help rid its service of bad actors and inappropriate content, many
rule-following users are complaining about being caught in Facebook's net. Last
month, some small business owners were shocked to find seemingly innocent
holiday advertisements caught in Facebook filters, hurting their business
during the most important time of the year. Users have created a number of
Change.org petitions over the years asking Facebook for better customer
service, including one started this fall that now has more than 800 signatures.
Unlike buying a TV commercial or a billboard, Facebook ads
require more hands-on attention. Many campaigns may include a number of
advertisements with different images or language depending on who is being
targeted. That specificity is the core benefit of advertising with Facebook.
The company's immense trove of user data enables advertisers to tailor messages
to very specific audiences. If one advertisement is performing poorly, a
plugged-in campaign manager might pull money from that advertisement and funnel
it to a different one that's getting a better response.
That's impossible to do if you can't access your Facebook
account. “Would you be comfortable with someone having your credit card and the
ability to spend on that credit card without any insight into what's going on?”
Frost asked.
Many Facebook Pages have multiple administrators, meaning if
one is suspended or loses access, others could still control advertisement
campaigns. But many businesses also pay for experts or specialists to do most
of the work, meaning advertisements from the account are essentially
unsupervised if that expert can't log in. Facebook says ad accounts that have
just one administrator are halted if that person is suspended, but in many
cases, advertisers aren't fully suspended - they're simply flagged by
Facebook's automated systems for spam, and temporarily locked out. But if an
account is locked out but not formally suspended, advertisements tied to that
account keep running.
To get back in, users are asked to verify their identities,
but Raines, Frost, and Kugler all had difficulty with Facebook's automated
systems. In multiple cases, they sent in pictures of their IDs without a
response, or requested verification codes to be sent via text message, but the
codes never arrived.
“While we offer tools to help small businesses connect with
potential customers and grow their business, we also have systems in place to
prevent abuse and protect people from scams,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a
statement. “Our enforcement, however, isn't perfect. We apologise for any
disruption.” Facebook says 99.9 percent of the spam it finds on the service is
discovered using automated systems.
The incidents highlight what is becoming an increasingly
troubling theme for Facebook. The social network has never been more important
to small businesses given the push toward online interactions during the
pandemic. Facebook is so crucial to smaller companies' sales that many couldn't
afford to stay away from the company's ad products this summer during a
big-brand boycott to protest its policies. Likewise, Facebook's relationships
with these advertisers is so central to its public messaging that the company
took out full-page ads in major US newspapers last week attacking Apple's
data-collection policies and positioning itself as a champion for small
businesses' online efforts.
But as that reliance has grown, Facebook's struggle to
support these businesses has begun to show. The company's automated
customer-service tools seem unable to support the number of businesses with
issues. When Kugler first submitted his information in an effort to recover his
account, including a photo of his ID, Facebook sent him an automated response
that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be “unable to review your account.”
“I didn't realise how dependent I was on Facebook's
platform,” Kugler said. “To get this sort of lack of accountability from a
company that seems to empower employees and all this stuff is absolutely
preposterous.”
A big part of the issue, according to Facebook advertisers,
is that the company doesn't have a robust set of customer service systems in
place for smaller advertisers. Facebook brags that it has 10 million
advertisers, but the majority of them don't have a regular human contact person
within the social network to resolve issues. The company offers an automated
chat feature for advertisers, but you need an active Facebook account to use
it, which means its not available to users who have been accidentally locked
out.
Lindsey Antonio, who manages a hotel in New Jersey, spends a
very small amount on Facebook advertisements every month -- about $30 (roughly
Rs. 2,200). But when her account was unexpectedly locked last week, she had no
recourse to recoup it. “I don't feel that there is an avenue, and even if there
was I am not sure I would be heard because I'm such a small contributor,” she
said. “In a year where my ownership group is having difficulty buying uniforms,
laying off people, they're still allowing me to advertise on Facebook and this
is kind of the repayment we get.”
Raines and Frost eventually gained access to their accounts
again, but don't think the issue was fixed through Facebook's proper channels.
Instead, they were lucky enough to find a Facebook employee on LinkedIn willing
to escalate their issue internally -- at Facebook's size, not a scalable
solution. Even though Raines's account was restored, he only recouped a portion
of the necessary ad features he needed. He had to continue using his wife's
account to manage ads for his clients for an another four days before he
regained full access himself.
“I'm a gnat on the back of a water buffalo,” Raines joked.
“It's just sitting back and hoping and waiting and that's a scary prospect when
your livelihood revolves around it.”
© Bloomberg