Facebook Terms of Service & Ad Disapprovals

Facebook security is extremely important. If security is not setup properly, it is not only easy to get hacked, but Facebook may ban your account since your settings are not stringent enough.

While Facebook has been making some improvements, it is still by far the touchiest platform. If you make too many mistakes from a security or ad disapproval standoint, Facebook will lock you out of your business manager or ad account as well as potentially lock anyone else connected to your business manager or ad account as well. It is often both impossible to ever get it back or to ever be able to create new accounts again, so take this training extremely seriously.

In the worst cases, the ad account issues will spiral to personal profiles as well and individuals will be banned from using Facebook for personal or business purposes. You can never create a new account because Facebook tracks your name, the devices you login from, the IP addresses you login from, the pages and ad accounts you've managed, the credit cards used on the accounts, and the friends you're connected with. If you try to create a new account, they will find it and ban it.

You would think that such drastic action would require egregious violations of policy. Unfortunately, this is not the case. For example, Facebook does not allow you to use before and after images in ads, like before treatment and after. You can also not use questions such as, "Are you struggling with addiction?"

Facebook gives no warnings and almost never any second chances. Little slip ups can permanently wreck you or your organization's ability to use the platform. We have seen it happen to companies big and small, so make sure you are always up-to-date on Facebook policies or that any agency you work with has regular protocols in place to make sure they are as well.

Ad Disapprovals

A full list of Facebook advertising policies can be found on their site here.

Make sure that you know every policy and do not create any ads or boost any posts before knowing these policies in detail as your account or profile can easily get banned. Ignorance is not an excuse according to the Facebook Policy Team.

This is why you should never have anyone on your team randomly boost posts. Facebook community policy for free social posts are different than rules for advertising. So a post that is fine to post for free on your page may violate advertising rules if boosted. You cannot assume that a free page post that was approved will not run afoul of ad policies and get your account banned if you boost it.

The three most common mistakes we see with behavioral health accounts are:

Trying to advertise without LegitScript certification for SUD providers.
Using Before & After images
Using the word "you" and implying a health condition or other problem.

Remember that Facebook uses AI to manage all ad policies. The AI bots are dumb. For example, this sentence: "If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, give us a call." Linguistically/grammatically speaking, an "if" sentence is a conditional and does not imply a statement about an individual. But the AI bots do not recognize this and so will flag and disapprove ads regardless. Also, if you do get through to a real person on Facebook Support, these staff are mostly interns and low-level staff following scripts. They do not understand nuance or, sometimes, basic common sense. For this reason, it is simply best to avoid anything that may trip the AI Bots flagging an account. Even if you're technically in the right, getting a qualified individual at Facebook to recognize that is well nigh impossible and you may be stuck with a banned account. We've seen it happen numerous times.

Finally, note that Facebook tunes the sensitivity of their bots up and down. Election seasons are very sensitive times for Facebook as they try to block political manipulation on their platform, so these are times to be extra careful.