Facebook Automation Mistakenly Hinders Small Businesses Occurred on 11 Nov 2020

Sarah Frier for Bloomberg published a report on how Facebook’s automation was negatively effecting small businesses. HoneyGramz and Ivonne Sanchez are two businesses the article highlights that had their ad accounts disabled, and a “pizza vending machine company, a reusable water bottle company, a coffee delivery service, a business coach and a hair weave company” were all suspended.

As Frier pointed out, these “mistakes” by Facebook have greater consequences for small businesses than what it might seem like at first:

Even if an ad account gets restored, businesses lose crucial momentum. Facebook’s advertising algorithm takes a couple of weeks to figure out which users may be interested in an ad, to refine the targeting.

Could this all be a result of Facebook leaning into automated content removal and taking even more aggressive measures toward policing “misinformation” (the latter being announced just one week prior to this)?