Ghosted by Meta: Businesses losing out from Facebook’s communication stonewall

After a three-year hiatus, the muster is returning at the end of this month – with “Bogan Bingo”, ute competitions and a festival stage featuring beloved Australian artists such as The Angels, Jessica Mauboy and Shannon Noll.

Using Facebook’s paid advertisement platform and unpaid posts, the Deni Ute Muster Facebook’s page was used to generate ticket sales, provide event updates, and as a selling point for its sponsorship deals.

“There’s no dollar value on the reach that we had,” organiser Vicky Lowry said of their access to the page’s 124,000 followers, which they spent nearly two decades building.

“The ticket sales we’ve lost, the information we can’t get out, and the sponsorship value – that’s going to affect us moving forward.”

When the usual (and ostensibly simple) route Facebook requires to restore a disabled account didn’t work, Wade and Lowry began what would become a two-month effort to find someone at Meta to help them.

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They trawled internet forums, contacted Meta representatives via their publicist, sent “dozens” of emails and even reached out to a Meta contact in Nashville.

“Nothing came of it,” Wade said – until this week, when after a request from this masthead, Meta reinstated the page. The company did not explain why previous efforts to contact them failed to elicit any action.

In the time without the event’s Facebook page, Lowry said sales were down about 1000 tickets, which at $295 a piece, cost them $300,000.

Meta’s communication stonewall is not unique to the muster. This masthead received dozens of emails from Facebook users after reporting on Meta mistakenly banning a small business from running advertisements.

Among the senders were several digital marketing agencies, a technology company in Toronto, Canada, an ex-pat agency in London, and dozens of small businesses. Some complained of being locked out of their account, others expressed concern over being permanently restricted from their ad accounts. Others had reset their password, but were never sent a pin to regain access.

The core problem in each of these complaints, however, was the same – they had no meaningful help from Facebook to address their issue.

“One of the Meta reps I spoke to suggested that I send a feedback form two to four times per week for up to six months,” said Sam Parkinson, who for over a fortnight has been locked out of his account, which he uses to run 25 of his clients’ advertising accounts.

Parent company Meta described these removals as “inadvertent”, but internal whistleblower documents which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal indicated the shutdowns were a deliberate negotiating tactic.

Meta’s core issue, says academic Daniel Angus, is a fundamental lack of transparency, and its cherry-picking of what information it chooses to share with the public, businesses and governments.

The site shares its advertising policies, but won’t detail the methods it uses to regulate ads, and permanently restrict accounts beyond vague descriptions. Advertisers have access to statistics on how their ads are performing, but Facebook won’t provide transparency on how that data is collected. In one instance, Facebook was found to have inflated viewer metrics on videos.

“They’ve created market dominance. When Instagram was challenging Facebook, what did Meta do? They turned around and bought them,” said Angus, a digital communication professor at Queensland University of Technology. Three million businesses globally actively advertise on Facebook, according to Meta.

Getting started on the world’s second-largest online advertising platform (behind Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube) is no problem: Meta encourages users with a free program known as Facebook Blueprint, which offers extensive courses on how to “make the most out of Facebook marketing platforms”. Advertising agencies can earn a Meta Business Partner Badge, providing them with “exclusive access” to support and resources.

Richard Quinn, who runs digital marketing company LiveSwitch, is one of those agencies. But despite having access to Facebook’s agency support and the guarantee that someone from Facebook will reach out “within 48 hours”, Quinn hasn’t had a response to any of the 20 of his requests for support in the past month after a client’s account was restricted.

He says one of his clients, whose ad account was permanently restricted, is losing inquiries every day.

“[Facebook advertising] was literally their sole source of marketing. They’re losing tens of thousands of dollars,” Quinn said.

Meta’s one-way communication model is a problem that Nicholas Stewart, partner at Dowson Turco Lawyers, knows well. His firm represents clients who, after running out of options, seek legal action to reinstate their Facebook accounts.

“You have your real life, and then you have your social life on Facebook or Instagram. Facebook has created that environment and made people dependent on it,” he said. “But then when something goes wrong in that world, it’s really hard to exercise any kind of right. Imagine in your physical world, if someone said to you ‘you’re not allowed to step outside anymore’.”

Stewart says they’ve been 100 per cent successful in reinstating their clients’ accounts, but acknowledges it’s a costly process that can take months.

It may now take even longer for future clients. This year, the social media giant’s lawyers ordered Stewart’s firm to stop sending relevant documents to a Meta email address they’d been using. Instead, they said, Stewart needed to send all correspondence via post to California.

“[This demand] is about Facebook deliberately stalling – and rejecting the online world – when it comes to bringing proceedings against Facebook.”

There are some standard international service rules which do require delivery of formal legal documents to a physical address, known as The Hague Service Convention.

But Stewart says that his firm’s correspondence did not require compliance with these rules, as his correspondence did not suggest that legal proceedings were imminent – or even likely.

“The correspondence sets out the circumstances of clients’ social media deactivation,” he said. “Our job is to show that our clients are hard-working people, of good character, who are suffering significantly as a result of Meta’s deactivation algorithm.”