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Facebook rejected my podcast ad

www.mollywood.co
Everybody in the Pool

Facebook rejected my podcast ad

Citing "discriminatory practices." This is how climate disinformation wins.

Molly Wood
May 26, 2023
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Facebook rejected my podcast ad

www.mollywood.co

Here’s the email I got from Facebook today after I spent a whole entire $60 to promote a post about my new podcast.

Attention: Your ad was rejected Hi Molly, Your ad was rejected because it doesn’t comply with our Discriminatory Practices policy. This means that your ad isn’t running and will not be delivered to your audience.  We know this may impact your current business objectives. If you believe it was incorrectly rejected, you can request another review.  We used technology to detect this violation and carry out this decision. Further violations of our Advertising Standards may result in your account being disabled or restricted.

I mean, wow. I clearly did something pretty bad, right? I must have been trying to run an ad engaging in blatant housing discrimination or spread misinformation to targeted racial groups or even, I don’t know, start an insurrection. Right?

Here’s the post.

If you love Marketplace, and you loved ME on Marketplace and Marketplace Tech, you'll definitely love Everybody in the Pool. It's basically the business podcast for the climate economy. This week, I interviewed my amazing real estate agent, Ana Forest, and my amazing interior designer friend, Cillesa Ullman, about what homebuyers are looking for in terms of green features, and eco-friendly remodel ideas (such as, omg this exists, recycled denim insulation!?). Also featuring more pool puns and also the phrase "toasty tootsies." It's not like Marketplace in EVERY way. Anyway, hope you enjoy and tell a friend. 🙂
On second thought, maybe it was the “toasty tootsies” thing.

Now. You know I prefer to focus on solutions. But one of the solutions is to reject the framing, over and over and over and over and over, that there is something inherently political or even up for debate about human-caused global warming and the climate crisis. There isn’t.

Everybody in the Pool is a reader-supported publication. My posts are free to read, but if you can afford to become a paid subscriber, I would be very grateful!

And yet, thanks to what are now well-documented disinformation campaigns perpetrated by fossil fuel companies and, as I, unfortunately, keep writing about, championed by some members of the GOP, this topic is considered controversial. Controversial enough, in fact, that you can’t boost a post about a podcast that contains the words “climate economy.”

Unless it’s the tootsies thing. I guess it could be that.

Anyway, on the one hand, I see how this happened. Facebook has been flooded with concerted efforts to distort the climate conversation—so much so, in fact, that Facebook is now considered an actual source of climate misinformation. It pledged to label climate disinformation online but it reportedly hasn’t. Experts insist Facebook knows who the major spreaders of coordinated disinformation are, but won’t take targeted action against them.

Instead, its solution seems to be an ad algorithm that is tuned to auto-reject promoted posts that contain the word “climate.” Meanwhile, it took in millions of dollars in advertising in 2022 from fossil fuel companies. This is, to paraphrase Nina Jankowicz, how you lose the information war.

Anyway, I’ll appeal, and in the meantime, I hope you’ll listen to the podcast (Apple | Google Podcasts | Subscribe for ad-free feeds) and tell a friend yourself, since clearly, social media is no help these days.

Thank you for reading Everybody in the Pool. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Facebook rejected my podcast ad

www.mollywood.co
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Cris Solomon
Writes Over The Ridge
May 26Liked by Molly Wood

I'm sure these issues wouldn't happen if your facebook ad budget was 1000x.

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Molly Wood
May 27Author

More, depressing and fascinating. https://climatejustice.rocks/@kathhayhoe/110436657882930430

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