I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.

Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.

When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.

Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.

Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")

Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.

It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).

Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...

The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.

It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).

Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.

I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff.

https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)

Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill.

There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.