Censored social media
A book on military hats and helmets apparently was deemed too political by Facebook this week – and as the co-author of the book this caught me by surprise but also allowed me to understand Facebook's policies regarding political advertising.
This all began when, in advance of the holiday shopping season I decided to "boost" a post on Facebook about my book, A Gallery of Military Headdress.Co-authored by my colleague Stuart Bates, it is in all fairness a book with limited appeal to a mass audience. However, Facebook would seem to be the perfect place to market it – especially during the holiday season.
My post explained, "This 140 page book features more than two dozen articles on military hats, helmets and other headgear from around the world. This publication also includes more than 200 color photographs as well as period prints and illustrations."
There was no reference to politics of any kind.
However, within hours of "boosting" the post, where I picked a target audience that included those in the United States with an interest in military history, it was rejected. This in itself wasn't a huge surprise – since releasing the book in the spring it has been hit or miss whether promotions on Facebook would be initially approved. More than once I've had to ask for a review, where every single time someone at the social network eventually agreed in no way was a book on the history of hats, helmets and other military headgear in violation of Facebook's rules.
In the past the issue was usually one of weapons. Helmets and hats aren't weapons, but perhaps a photo of soldiers wearing helmets and holding guns was the issue. The issue has never really been clear, so maybe the very word "military" in the title was the issue.
Since releasing the book in February and promoting it nearly a dozen times I've never actually been able to get anything resembling a straight answer on why the ads/boosted posts were rejected. Facebook would only refer me to its policies on weapons, including a ban on the sale of any post that encourages the sale of guns.
Again, I never promoted anything about guns – I was merely was trying to sell my niche interest book.
The most likely explanation is that the automated process and algorithms were simply way overzealous in seeing a problem. Given the amount of controversial content across social media it is simply frustrating given this was about a history-related issue.
I am not alone in this confusion.
"It seems ridiculously restrictive to me, but I suspect it's mainly a matter of Facebook acting to reduce its liability," explained Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"This is one of those classic 'throwing the baby out with bathwater' situations that injures legitimate sellers like you," added King. "The larger issue is that Facebook appears to be too big to effectively control bogus gun sales or to care much about who gets stepped on by a poorly constructed policy."
Too Political
Given the issues I've experienced in the past, this time around I was careful not to include any photos of soldiers and only provided photos of military hats. The cover of the book is also free of any guns, and as noted above the title makes it pretty clear what it is about: A Gallery of Military Headdress.
Yet, sure enough the ad/promotion was rejected. The reasoning was even more confusing this time:
"We require people to complete an ID confirmation to run ads about social issues, elections or politics."
In other words, this time Facebook rejected my ad – again which was to sell a history-themed book – on the grounds that it somehow violated Facebook's policy regarding political ads. It isn't clear why Facebook's algorithms believed this to be politically based, apart from the fact that it falls into the category of military history.
About the most political part of the book is a section on Warsaw Pact helmets that were used during the Cold War, but the book doesn't go into the geopolitical situation of the Communist Bloc. Instead it merely focused on when particular helmets were introduced by the various nations.
In other words, William F. Buckley Jr. and Noam Chomsky I'm not.
Moreover, I'll be the first to admit I don't even like including my name alongside the likes of such military history writers as John Keegan or Stephen E. Ambrose – but in all fairness this most recent work is closer to the latter two authors, who never really discussed politics.
This book is really about historical objects, so it is essentially a book about military antiques as collectibles. Given this I reached out to a fellow author.
"I've never had any issues, but it has been eight or nine months since I did the last promotion," said Chris Armold, author of multiple books on military helmets.
He explained that his promotions for his most recent book Sky-Cops & Peacekeepers: Uniforms, Equipment and a History of the USAF Air Police and Security Police were without issue.Perhaps Facebook has changed its policies on military themed books in the meantime, but Armold had no problems and actually said such efforts paid off.
"When I boosted a post for the book it did very well," added Armold.
However, with other posts on Facebook Armold has had issues, but at least those were within the social network's existing policies.
"I did have a problem when I tried to sell a Remco Marine Raider Toy Bazooka, and that promotion was pulled by Facebook," he explained. "I appealed but never heard anything. However, since Facebook can't tell the difference between a toy and a real bazooka I'm hesitant give them any more money."
Request For Review
Within hours of requesting a review a member of the Facebook responded to my request with the canned answer: "The text and/or imagery you're using is about social issues, elections or politics, based on the definition we're using for enforcement."
So in 'Facebook Speak' it sounds like anything could be about "social issues," even if the ad wasn't directly political, and after some digging and back and forth with Facebook I was directed to a page that included an "initial list of top-level issues that will be considered to require advertiser authorization and labeling for ads targeting the US. We regularly review our advertising policies and update them when needed. As a result, the list of social issues may change over time."
Here was where guns as well as security and foreign policy were included as social issues.
Only in the vaguest of concepts would anyone consider a book on military hats to be one that fell into the security and foreign policy areas, but as noted "based on the definition" this was the issue.
At this point via a message from Facebook I was told I could boost the ad, but to do so would require me to supply detailed personal information. This is required to boost any politically charged post or to place a political ad on the platform.
The reasoning from Facebook is one of transparency on who is placing political ads. Do I want to provide even more personal information to a service notorious for gathering too much personal information from its users? Moreover, is it really worth going through all this to try to sell a few more copies of the book.
Facebook Bias
After reviewing the situation and attempting numerous appeals it is clear Facebook won't budge– but it begs the question from the beginning why a non-political book is seen as politically charged?
"This is Facebook caught with its biases showing," suggested Jim Purtilo, associate professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland.
"Algorithms used to classify content sent to Facebook must be 'trained' to distinguish acceptable traffic," said Purtilo. "That means the company will have previously decided on a big collection of documents that it labeled 'good' and by exclusion the rest were labeled 'bad' – the computers take over from there and create a model that is used to predict the label on new content."
Of course it is all too common for such a model to miss nuances that result in a false-positive or false-negative, which is to say an inappropriate post will appear or a suitable post will be filtered.
"That's when the trainer intervenes, reviews the content and adds corrected labels," added Purtilo. "This is how models improve over time. Facebook has a business interest in tuning its models to achieve dominance in the marketplace; apparently the company has an interest in tuning its models to achieve specific social outcomes too."
As a result content from certain communities gets closer scrutiny from the algorithms and probably a harder time getting approved.
"Tech talk about, say, military headgear will thus look to the algorithms like it is somehow associated with text that violated policy, just because the combination of words in that article had been together in the wrong place at the wrong time," warned Purtilo. "'Good' articles on topics that Facebook approves, and which it trains its algorithms on, do not use the same words in quite the same way. Among words it is all guilt by association."
Finally Approved
After going through all of the above I opted to rework the ad one last time and this time included a link to my website selling the book. Almost all of the photos were the same and the text was virtually unchanged.
Apparently this was enough to satisfy Facebook, which finally approved the boosted post. But given the trouble, going forward I may simply take Armold's stance and not give Facebook anymore money.
There are other ways to market the book!
