Facebook ad denied for vulgar language with generic response after appeal

Facebook denied our latest ad request…again. I understand the need to prevent people from using vulgar language or even harmful language, but sometimes the need to be politically correct borders on plain absurd. In fact, I wouldn’t even have written this article if FaceBook’s Ad Team provided something more tangible than a copy-paste response.

You see, FaceBook’s new policies make it difficult to grow a new page unless you pay to advertise. Fine, it is their platform after all. And their community policies seem to be as completely “PC” as possible, to the extent of not to hurt the feelings of the color blue. Fine, it is their platform.

Anyways, I created an ad on December 2 that was denied. It was the first ad, and I followed the appeal process. This was the original ad, word for word:

“The Uber Newbs has a new post! Fallout 4l lost companion bug”

After appealing I read through every piece of documentation I could find on their community and ad policies. The only thing I could come up with was the lack of proper punctuation. That’s right, your ads have to be grammatically correct, and mine lacked a trailing “.”

Another stretch was the use of the word “Newbs”. I’m not entirely certain how this could be considered profane, especially when its referring to us, not you or them. If that is the case, it is as absurd as being offend because I might refer to myself as “fat”. Seriously, that offends you?

So, in an attempt to expedite things I deleted the ad and created a new one on December 3. Shortly after I deleted the original ad, I received the following response:\

FB Appeal Approved

It says that:

“Hi Jason, Thank you for notifying us about your ad disapproval. We’ve reviewed your ad again and have determined it complies with our policies…”

Kicking myself for having deleted the previous ad, I quickly requested another ad. Again, auto denied. So I reworded it again and again and again. Eventually I said forget it, would write it up in the absolutely most friendly way possible, this was the latest ad:

LatestAdThis ad was also auto-denied. At this point I didn’t expect anything less. It was already late in the day on Thursday, December 3, 2015. Knowing the review could take a full business day, and suspecting I would just keep getting auto-denied for some glitch in their approval algorithm, I decided to just file an appeal and wait patiently for a human to read it and realize that it did not contain any “vulgar language”. I really wanted to run the ad on a Friday, because lets face it…90% of you spend more time at work on Fridays on Facebook than doing anything else. It is arguably the best day of the week to advertise.

So we fast forward to this morning, Saturday, December 5, 2015. To my shock and dismay, I got what appeared to be nothing more than an auto-deny for “vulgar language.” Listen, I’m a U.A. Army Veteran and so is Hagen, we can get vulgar if you want to see vulgar, but really this whole website/YouTube channel is for my 12 year old son, so we try to keep it family friendly.

Hi Jason, Thanks for writing in. Your ad wasn’t approved because the body/title text used in the ad has profane language. Such ads may offend the users and lead to high negative sentiment.
The language of the ad should be focused on the product and not users. You can recreate your post with these guidelines in mind and try to boost it again….

I understand you might have a lot of work on your plate Andy, but if you are going to accuse me of using profanity or vulgar language, I would like a more in-depth analysis than such a vague statement. Mainly because I am attempting to pay for a service that you deny me with little justification as to why.

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

SecondAppealRequestSecondAppealDeniedRequestForClarification

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