Their ad account was disabled when they tried to run the ads, Signal said.
Well, Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director, tweeted that Signal never actually tried to run the ads. Facebook then put out a full statement saying that if Signal had tried to run the ads, a few of them would have been rejected because that “assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation.” Though, advertisers can use that to target you?
But wait! There’s more. Signal then fired back, saying, no, the screenshots were real and their account was disabled. Then, finally, Joe Osborne, who does corporate communications at Facebook, tweeted that the ads were not what was rejected, but that Signal’s account was “briefly disabled” for an unrelated payments issue.
Anyways, at no point in all of this back and forth did anyone from Facebook say that any of the targeting options Signal focused their ads on were untrue or not real.
Very clever, and I say that both for the ads themselves and also because I think they expected this outcome. Facebook shutting them down gives them a good story they can use as an ad itself, as...
Very clever, and I say that both for the ads themselves and also because I think they expected this outcome. Facebook shutting them down gives them a good story they can use as an ad itself, as they've done here.
That's awesome! I want to be able to show people this is how these things work so they'll understand what tracking is actually doing. But of course, Facebook's entire business model is predicated...
That's awesome! I want to be able to show people this is how these things work so they'll understand what tracking is actually doing. But of course, Facebook's entire business model is predicated on keeping the user as in the dark as possible, so it'll never happen.
There's been some strange additional claims and developments happening with this story. From Ryan Broderick's newsletter yesterday:
Very clever, and I say that both for the ads themselves and also because I think they expected this outcome. Facebook shutting them down gives them a good story they can use as an ad itself, as they've done here.
Kind of an amusing ad campaign, I wonder how long it was live before Facebook shut it down.
That's awesome! I want to be able to show people this is how these things work so they'll understand what tracking is actually doing. But of course, Facebook's entire business model is predicated on keeping the user as in the dark as possible, so it'll never happen.