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Breastfeeding workshop, pants for postpartum comfort, consent education: These are just a few of the services and products featured in ads Facebook rejected. Center for Proximity Justice.
For the report, nonprofit founder Jackie Rotman interviewed employees and leaders at more than 35 companies and surveyed dozens more focusing on women’s sexual health issues, including pelvic pain, menopause, menstruation and fertility. (The survey was created in partnership with Origin, a pelvic floor physical therapy company.)
All 60 companies had ads rejected by Facebook, and about half of them said their accounts were suspended at some point. According to the reportHe was released on Tuesday. In many cases, Facebook has labeled ads as containing “adult content” or promoting “adult products and services.”
Facebook in its advertising policies says “Ads promoting sexual and reproductive health products or services, such as birth control and family planning, must be targeted at people aged 18 and over and not focus on sexual pleasure.”
Facebook provides examples of disallowed (“buy our sex toys for adult enjoyment”) and permitted advertising (“once a day new moisturizing lubricant to relieve vaginal dryness” and “apply safe sex”) on its website. with our condom brand”).
Still, Ms. Rotman found several ads targeting men that were deemed by Facebook despite appearing to violate the social media platform’s policy: a condom ad promising “pleasure”; one for lubricant (“man-only lotion”); and another for the erectile dysfunction pill that promises a “wet, hot American summer.”
“Right now, it’s arbitrary to say whether a product is allowed in a way that we think is truly sexist overtones and a lack of understanding of health,” Ms Rotman said. He said it was a “systemic problem” and added that it was particularly harmful to small businesses.
“We welcome advertisements for sexual health products, but we prohibit nudity and have specific rules about how these products can be marketed on our platform,” a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company Meta said in an email. “We’ve given advertisers detailed information about what types of products and descriptions we allow in ads.”
The spokesperson added that Facebook has made mistakes in enforcing its advertising policies and has broken several ad rejections experienced by some companies named in the report.
One company that has struggled to get Facebook-approved ads is Joylux, which sells menopause health products, including a device that is inserted into the vagina and used to strengthen the pelvic floor.
“Our consumer is a Facebook consumer,” said Colette Courtion, CEO of Joylux, who founded the company in 2014. “She is a 50-year-old woman. Facebook is the best place for her to learn about menopause.” Ms. Courtion added that Facebook is Joylux’s best customer acquisition channel.
But he said Joylux employees have long been confused about Facebook’s policies and how they are implemented.
“Because of the nature and appearance of our product,” he said, Facebook and other companies believe it is “pornographic.”
Ms Courtion said Joylux’s Facebook account has been shut down twice since 2017. The company did not tell him why.
Heather Dazell, Joylux vice president of marketing, said it found that “any ad that goes directly to our site will be automatically rejected because of the word ‘vagina’.”
A spokesperson for Meta said Facebook does not have a general ban on words like “menopause” or “vagina”, but does take into account “how each ad is positioned”.
Over the years Joylux has withdrawn its approach to Facebook ads. But despite the changes Joylux has made to its copy and images, many of its ads are still rejected during the initial review process. Two years ago, Joylux started working with an agency that helped the company appeal ad rejection. Usually, ads are approved after appeal.
Saying that the process is time-consuming and expensive, however, Courtion said that the resulting ads are not helpful for consumers. “We can’t show what the product looks like and we can’t tell what it does,” he said.
Intimate Rose, a company that sells vaginal dilators and pelvic floor weights and wands in Kansas City, Mo., faced similar issues. “Normally we always get rejected,” said Adrienne Fleming, the company’s head of digital media.
He gave several examples, including an ad featuring a fully clothed, smiling couple (“Live again, laugh and love again with pelvic health products from Intimate Rose,” the copy reads). Two other ads featured videos of women discussing how Intimate Rose weights helped them with incontinence. Ms Fleming said all ads were rejected because Facebook had classified them as “adult products or services.”
In adult products division Meta gives a few examples of items prohibited under its trade policy: “images of nudity, including sex toys, sexually-enhancing products, sexually oriented adult products such as pornography, or used or worn underwear, partial child nudity, even if not sexually explicit. Nature.”
However, the policy states that “products such as lubricants or condoms that do not focus on sexual pleasure or sexual enhancement” are allowed.
In a post he shared with The New York Times on Facebook, Fleming pointed out that the company’s products are not intended for sexual intercourse or pleasure. In response, the Facebook representative pointed to its trade policy and said that the ad was properly rejected and could not provide further details as they could be used to circumvent the policy in the future.
“It’s up to the referee’s decision,” said Aaron Wilt, co-founder of Intimate Rose.
It’s not just businesses that use Facebook ads. RNW Media, a Dutch non-profit organization, builds online communities for social change, including Love Matters, which focuses on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and relies on Facebook ads to reach its target audience.
Over the course of six years, approximately 1,800 ads by Love Matters posted on Facebook. denied, according to a report on the sustainability of journalism and news media presented at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in 2020. Often this was because ads were classified as “adult content” or “sex toys”.
Michael Okun Oliech, social media director for Love Matters Kenya, said Facebook recently rejected two ads it sent out to promote an “escort service”. One of them was about consent; the other was about living with HIV
He said the appeals process took him from a week to months and rarely had the opportunity to speak to a “real person”. To avoid rejection, Mr. Okun Oliech began using slang and using fruit emojis to replace words describing certain body parts (a tactic that has been successful for companies like Hims, which sells Viagra).
But Charlotte Petty, a human rights expert at RNW Media, is worried about the consequences of being implicit or implicit. “There are ways to reduce censorship, but at some point we compromise our own business,” he said.
Facebook’s advertising platform has been criticized many times in recent years. in 2018 Washington Post investigation It found that dozens of ads for LGBTQ-related events, companies, and nonprofits were blocked by the social network because they were deemed “political.” Requiring advertisers focused on politics or social issues to go through several additional layers for ad approval, Facebook described the majority of ad rejections as a mistake.
Meta in November, stop advertisers from targeting people with promotions based on their interactions with content related to health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion and sexual orientation, among other identifiers. The tools have been used to discriminate against certain groups and spam people.
Ms. Rotman is hopeful Facebook can move fast when it comes to sexual health and wellness companies. “This is a solvable problem,” he said. “It’s not as complicated as protecting democracy or elections. It’s about finding a way to make sure ads for women’s health aren’t blocked. It’s just a matter of Facebook deciding this is something they’re going to fix.”
Ryan Mac contributing reporting.
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