Friday, June 19, 2009

No sense of humor

x-belly-buttonToday I was shocked to discover that Facebook, or at least some of the people who work there are far too serious … perhaps even to the extent of being prudish.

This all began several months ago, when I created a group on Facebook called I used to have a bellybutton and described it as a just for fun – totally pointless group to encourage others to post true facts which don’t make any sense. (I might add that I “lost” my own BB a couple of years ago during major surgery and occasionally joke about my “loss”.)

Recently, I decided to promote this group out of curiosity to see how many other people also might share my condition.

I applied to Facebook to run an ad promoting the group and displaying the above photo only to have it rejected with the following explanation:

The image of this ad is either irrelevant or inappropriate. Per sections 3 and 8 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, the image on your ad should be relevant and appropriate to the item being advertised. Images that are overly explicit, provocative, or that reveal too much skin are not allowed. Images that may either degrade or idealize any health condition or body type are also not allowed.

I didn’t particularly feel that the image was too risqué, however, I changed the picture and tried again with the following ad:

ad reject

Again, the ad was rejected on the same grounds.

To me, the whole idea of seeing if there are others who share my condition was a bit of a lark, but the reactions of the people who run Facebook’s ads seems to me exceedingly conservative.

What do you think?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It makes no sense to me. None.

Ali Silveria said...

Jack and Phillips, good to see there are some of us out there that find everything is a positioning game.

All I can say is people have no sense of humor anymore because everything is such a god awful pain in the butt to deal with because of the law.

Don't get me wrong, the law is a great thing, but the problem is everything is so up for grabs with the leagal system that you almost have to dot all the ize and cross all the tees.

It make me pretty hot when I think about how little legal training "We the people..." really get. Anyway, nuff said for now. Keep making a squawk and good to see you out and about oh mighty mentor.

Proactively, Ali S.