Facebook rejected my podcast ad

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

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

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.

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.

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.