I’ve been banned by the Circumventing Systems policy before (a few years ago), with no explanation of what system I circumvented or how the ban was triggered. Two appeals via the Google system failed (with generic responses) so I reached out to an ex-colleague who now works there and she escalated it internally, and I was magically unblocked, but still have no idea why it happened.

Recently launched a new startup and decided to look at Facebook ads, set up a brand new business account and page and the ad account was instantly banned. An appeal resulted in the message “your account has been consistently promoting ads that do not comply with our policies” but I’ve never run a single ad since they banned the account before I could even create one. The whole ecosystem feels like a bad joke at this point!

So wait — you were banned by Google, then years later banned by Facebook before even trying to run ads?

That almost sounds like they’re sharing ban lists

I think it's just coincidental, especially since the companies for which I was trying to run ads have no connection to each other (apart from me working there). It made me realise just how common these arbitrary automated bans are though.

I hope this attracts attention from someone who knows more than I do, but I can’t see anything wrong with that. The arbitrary and immense power FAANG wields is fucking terrifying.

I hope so - thank you for the support! :)

FYI you’re also blocked by some lists on NextDNS, consequently I couldn’t view your site. I bet that’s a consequence of the google issue, best of luck solving this.

Oh no! But how would they know? Now I'm worried some malware is running on my site or something...

Check the webmaster tools on Google, Bing, and any other relevant search engine. If they've detected malware on your site, the webmaster tooling will highlight it.

Virustotal.com also supports URL scanning, of you're concerned about a specific payload.

Thanks - at least the online tools like Virustotal don't show anything.

You're ublocked now. Just checked

yayy! Thank you for checking :)