Facebook deplatformed us for not advertising

BitEdge had a Facebook page which we used to share whatever was on our mind about crypto, sports and gambling. The page had about 150 likes.

We chose not to force ourselves into Facebook users’ news feeds. People visited our page if they wanted to, or saw our posts in their news feed if they chose to like us. Everyone was happy with this except Facebook.

Our page was unpublished with no notification or reason was given. When I requested to have our page re-published Facebook made me fill out and sign multiple forms, questionnaires, addendums and declarations. It was so stringent because our page was gambling related so there are extra requirements. When I got through it all they said

“your domain is onboarded and you can start with advertising”

Facebook had made me apply for approval to run paid ads. That’s not what I wanted, I just wanted our page re-published, which had still not happened. When I told Facebook that they said

“Pages may not promote real-money gambling on the platform, unless prior approval has been provided by Facebook.”

When I asked how to request such approval I was told

“You will have to reach out to your Facebook Representative in order to submit new request”

When I asked how to contact our Facebook Representative I was told

“Facebook actively reaches out to Page admins for marketing support. There is not currently a process to obtain a dedicated Facebook representative.”

That means I can’t even ask for our page to be re-published until I become a paid advertiser (“marketing support” is for paying advertisers only) and pay enough to warrant a representative contacting me.

That is not just my interpretation, a lot of page admins have gone through this and found they have to spend more than $10,000 a month advertising on Facebook to keep a gambling page published.

If you don’t pay for advertising, you can’t keep a gambling-related page published.

Spammers welcome, actually, spammers only!

Facebook takes advantage of the fact that they can put special rules on gambling content, to make it only allowed for paying advertisers. It does not sound like censorship because people expect gambling content to be limited and have special rules and restrictions. Facebook could not get away with this for most topics.

This explains why all the gambling content on Facebook feels spammy. Facebook only lets spammers have gambling pages. If you’re not a spammer, like BitEdge is not, then Facebook will deplatform you. In general, Facebook encourages spamming, in the case of gambling, however, Facebook requires spamming, offering its platform exclusively to spammers!

This obviously has a very detrimental effect on the quality of gambling content on Facebook.

Incompetent bureaucracy with bad support

Getting clarity on this took almost 2 months and support was terrible. I was told to visit URLs that were broken links, told to re-submit things I had already submitted, I have led around in circles. All the worst experiences you get when dealing with a large organization that has no interest in actually helping you.

Most Fakebook ad clicks are fake

I tried running Facebook ads after I got a $150 Facebook advertising voucher at a conference. Over 90% of clicks/impressions were from bots. I could tell because almost all the “users” who came from the ads had JavaScript disabled. Human browsers run Java Script, bots don’t.

This is a known problem with advertising on Facebook as detailed by hundreds of reports including Forbes, Inc. and Reddit.

Onward and upward without Failbook

We will be more active on 2 better social media networks that are slightly less censoring and greedy, those being Twitter and Youtube, please follow us there.

Update: BitEdge page republished

2021

Facebook re-published our page out of the blue without notifying us. So again if you would like non-spammy high-quality gambling content then check it out and give us a like. Cheers.