Facebook Disables My Ad Account AFTER I Stopped Advertising Steem!

Within a day of Facebook banning cryptocurrency ads, I stopped the ads for Steem. I did not make any new ads for Steem going forward and figured that would fully comply with Facebook's new no cryptocurrency ads policy. On the day Facebook disabled my advertising account, I had NO ADS RUNNING and was spending NO MONEY ADVERTISING!
Given this data, the only logical assumption about what happened is that Facebook RETROACTIVELY banned my account from advertising because of ads I did BEFORE the new policy took place!

Facebook Disables My Ad Account After $120,502 in Advertising Budget + Rejects Appeal!

What makes this more ridiculous is that my advertising account is one of the oldest on Facebook with years of history including $120,000 spent on Facebook ads, 872 million impressions, 111 million people reached around the globe, and hundreds of pages, videos, and websites successfully promoted. None of that had any impact on the "Your ad account has been flagged for policy violations message.

The funny part about this is that I have been making tutorials for years on Facebook ads on YouTube including several on what to do next after having an ad account disabled based on my experience working with clients that got theirs disabled. After making a tutorial on what to do next after getting an account disabled I am here today to lead by example after years of telling others what to do.

Given some clients were successful in having accounts restored, I filed an appeal despite the certainty that I would get a copy and paste reply.
Here's the appeal I filed.

"Will you give me some feedback about my account?"

I was not actually running any ads in my account when my account was disabled. I had all my ads off and my account was disabled while no ads were running. I ran a lot of ads for cryptocurrencies, which I turned off after the policy change.

Here's the reply I get from Stella. Is that a real name?

It's a copy and paste reply. There's nothing at all. Maybe this survey link was done.

I put this in March 27 and got a reply on the same day. This is just a copy and paste reply and I doubt anyone took more than a quick overview of the account and did not answer any questions.

I took the time to put a nice one-star feedback on the survey, but everyone else probably does the same thing. Facebook probably knows their support’s terrible and they just deal with it.

One thing I'm very grateful for is the opportunity to not pay Facebook any more money. I think Facebook may be one of the worst things that has happened on this planet. It is taking billions of people's photos, stories and effort creating content, and then selling all those people's content essentially to advertisers as data.

That means, billions of people around the world are doing a bunch of things for free that have made Facebook rich given Facebook’s massive power, and then those users are being influenced often by advertisers, which don't have their best interest in mind, selling them products and services that lead them into spending money on things that are not necessary, even selling products and services that hurt them and cause damage to their bodies.

I am grateful for the chance to not spend any more money with Facebook. I will not create a new ad account. I will not try to work around this. I will simply direct as many people off of Facebook as possible to other places.

I think one place that is much better is on Steem.

This is a massive innovation in terms of business model where those of us who create things, even if we only earn a little bit, we have the chance to get something back in return. We have integrated marketing where when we promote our product, we get a percentage of the ad revenue back.

When I spend money to promote on Steem I get a percentage back and no one can ban me from Steem although I can get downvoted. There are business models today that I think Facebook is afraid of. I think Facebook is afraid of these cryptocurrency business models.

Yes, there's been some cryptocurrency scams and ICO's, but I think Facebook is afraid of this cryptocurrency revolution because when people can work together, we collectively can take on the power of an online juggernaut like Facebook.

When billions of us start to see, "You know what, why are we giving away everything we do for free and then allowing a company to get rich off of it, and then have power and influence over us."

I do not take time to do anything on Facebook now without the purpose of getting people off of Facebook. I put automatic posts on Facebook, I do live streams intended to help people and essentially get people off of Facebook.

I don't use Facebook like a regular user to just look at photos and I think Facebook's an example of technology that seems like a good idea at first and all of a sudden we start to realize we're on our phones instead of participating in the lives of the people around us. We're looking at photos from girls we had crushes on in high school instead of noticing our friends and family who are around us.

I'm grateful Facebook has disabled my account today and I'm grateful I've taken it like this. I've had a lot of things get banned and suspended in seven years of having a business online and I feel good in this case. I did not break any rules to earn this. Facebook literally retro-actively banned my account for the ads I was running before they came up with this new policy, and I love this support request, "We don't support ads for your business model."

What is my business model? Facebook just copied and pasted a business model in there. What is my business model? I had no ads running. My business model is trying to help and do things that are useful and help others of us feel good. So, that's my little rant.

I also think YouTube and Google have a lot of the same things going on as Facebook. The difference is that YouTube actually does share the revenue back. When YouTube earns ad revenue YouTube actually shares that back with the content creators.

Facebook gives nothing. Nothing! Facebook sucks! Facebook takes everything and somehow tricks users into giving everything, photos, time, energy, even money.

You could say I'm one of the biggest idiots of all. There are few people, I realize there are thousands or maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, but relative to the amount of people on Facebook, there's few who have been dumb enough to dump $120,000 into Facebook ads. Now, I hope I've shared a lot of things that have been helpful and useful in the ads. A lot of the money I've spent on Facebook ads has been to share motivational videos with people, to share videos that make people laugh.

I've done a lot of ads on Facebook that have gotten attention because I don't do my ads exclusively with a pure profit motive. I do my ads to genuinely help share love and joy with the world and it makes sense that Facebook wouldn't want stuff like that on there.

When you see the things that are advertised on Facebook you can see that that's not a good place to be spending a lot of money as an advertiser, time and energy.

Now, I hope this video is helpful. I've had a lot of people following me that have had accounts disabled that have come to me for help. The main thing I notice that other people that I've talked to end up learning the hard way and taking a lot of extra time and energy, is this refusal to be flexible.

I will make no effort to attempt to ever advertise on Facebook again. I'm not going to try to get around this. I notice a lot of people following me get their account disabled, and then keep trying, "Jerry, I've created six more accounts and they've all got disabled."

Well, stop creating new accounts.

"I want to advertise on Facebook."

Stop. Just stop. Quit trying to advertise somewhere that doesn't want your money.

Thank God, Facebook has given me an opportunity. Everything bad that happens is an opportunity to learn and grow. This is one less thing for me to think about and consider, and now I do have a page with two million people on it where I'm lucky to have 50,000 people a week see my posts for free after all this ad spend.

I'm grateful to have this message to share today because when these painful things happen, we often feel ashamed of ourselves like I did something wrong. I did nothing wrong and Facebook did nothing wrong too.

Facebook just thought, whoever banned my account or however it happened, the people were just doing what they were told to do. People are doing their best, they're doing their best at Facebook and the question is, when this is the best Facebook can do, is this a business we want to support?

Is this a business we want to help grow? My answer's no.

I'm excited that Facebook is likely to go out of business and become completely non-existent at some point in my lifetime. I'm very excited about it. I think decentralized communities like Steem on Steemit.com, I think these things will replace Facebook.

They're an entire business model ahead. A business model like Facebook, I think, is extremely exploitive for every single user on Facebook, and you could look at it and say that I've been exploited quite a bit. I was tricked into spending $120,000. What do I have back out of it? Two million people following me online, many of which don't care what I have to say.

You could argue that I've advertised things to millions of people probably hundreds of millions of people who weren't interested in what I had to say and perhaps had no business seeing an ad from me. I advertised globally and I got my ads out all over the place with 111 million people reached.

Well, I'm grateful today that I've been cut off from using any more Facebook ads because I think I'm much better off this way.

I'm grateful for the chance to share this with you today and I hope this is helpful whether you've had an ad account turned off, or whether you're advertising on Facebook, or whether you're thinking about it, to think about some of these things in the bigger picture.

I love you. You're awesome. Thank you for sharing this with me today and I'll see you on Steem! If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj

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