Facebook “permanently disabled” the ads account of Heroes of Liberty after it said the conservative children’s book publisher’s posts — which promoted books about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former President Ronald Reagan — violated the company’s policy against “low quality or disruptive content.”
Facebook first locked the account on December 23, telling the publisher its account, ads and some of its advertising assets were disabled because it failed to comply with the policy, according to Fox Business.
Heroes of Liberty appealed that decision, at which point Facebook chose to permanently disable the account.
“After a final review of this ad account, we confirmed it didn’t comply with our Advertising Policies or other standards,” Facebook told the publisher. “You can no longer advertise with this ad account and its ads and assets will remain disabled. This is our final decision.”
Heroes of Liberty editor and board member Bethany Mandel questioned if a children’s biography of Ronald Reagan is “no longer permissible on Facebook” in comments to Fox Business.
“We don’t know,” she said. “But apparently promoting one may well kill a business.”
“We began investing in Facebook four months before we launched our first book,” she added. “We invested most of our marketing budget on the platform, and now our budget (the money we’ve already spent), as well as our assets and data are gone. Marketing-wise we are back in square one, financially it’s even more challenging.”
The publisher, which officially launched on November 14, began investing resources to build a brand on Facebook back in July. It used the ads account to promote and sell books, promoting 68 ads between November 23 and December 23 alone. More than 95 percent of the money spent on ads during that time went to ads ranked “average” or “above average” in Facebook’s quality score, according to the report. Just three ads were rated below “average.”
“There was a small but noisy group of responders to our ads who didn’t like the fact we published books about Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell and Amy Coney Barrett; people we called Heroes of Liberty,” Mandel told the outlet. “They made nasty comments, especially about Reagan, and about us for publishing these books and even shared their desire to burn them.”
“It’s very likely those same people reported to Facebook that our content is disturbing, because it doesn’t sit well with their radical worldview,” she said. “These are the same people who riot and take down statues of our founding fathers in the real world, and they want to strip us of our ability to honor our Heroes in the digital sphere and in children’s books.”
She accused Facebook of seemingly going with the “mob judgment call” rather than “common sense.”