From the OP's quoting of Facebook:

>"Your ad content violates Facebook Ad Guidelines. Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products."

From DNA Lounge's page, http://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2015/04-10.html:

>"From the dawn of humanity, to Ancient Egypt, to the glory that was Rome; everybody loves a burlesque show! Join San Francisco's world-famous Hubba Hubba Revue for an epic night of tassels & tease, thousands of years in the making!"

It's an adult live show, a burlesque. Facebook policy rules it out and it's very cut-and-dried.

The only reason this appears to be here is an attempt at viral marketing.

13+ social media site won't advertise 18+ (or 21+ presumably if it's USA based on drinking laws) live show for adults with softcore sexual content.

Flagged.

Seriously.

If you've got a conservative workplace, I wouldn't recommend clicking through. Their site includes topless women ... which I would be hard-pressed to defend as "not adult", regardless of their hand placement.

If you think jwz is doing some "viral marketing", then you're really lacking in your knowledge of net.history. Ending your post with "flagged" makes it doubly foolish.

I'm saying that, as someone who has read his various rants throughout the years on jwz.org, and followed his twitter feed, I can say with a great degree of confidence that a) he didn't post this to HN, and b) he really couldn't give enough of a shit to "viral market" anything.

You're free to form your own opinions, although if you must, I would urge you to avail yourself of the opportunity to read through his website and past writings. I find your continued contention that he is using viral marketing to be rather amusing.

I'm not continuing to contend anything about jwz - I never said he posted it to HN, there is no byline on the blog-post.

The OP blog-post is definitely mock indignation, it's not there to accomplish anything but notability through complaint against a corporation (Facebook) against whom it is trendy to complain vehemently. This is known as a "viral marketing technique" because, as has been seen, the intention is that the complaint should acquire attention and in doing so will shed light on the complainers business interests. jwz may not have intended it but the blog post is operating in that capacity.

> We will all be so much better off once Facebook finally craters into irrelevance

> Facebook has made itself sadly, tragically, despicably indispensable as a means of reaching customers.

I would think the solution is blindingly obvious.

>I would think the solution is blindingly obvious.

It feels obvious, indeed, but please explain the steps we should take to achieve the solution, because some of us are a bit slow.

It's easy! Just Disrupt™ Facebook!

/s

There are efforts to do this in a decentralized, peer-to-peer way.

https://joindiaspora.com/ http://www.synereo.com/

jwz wants facebook to "crater".

Then he says it's essential.

So he wants everyone else to get off Facebook, and then he (presumably) will when it's no longer essential.

If you want something, you yourself have to do it. It's like voting, people say that "my vote doesn't count, so I won't vote." But the point of voting is not individual votes, it's that significant portions of the population vote. And you win some, you lose some.

So if he wants Facebook to crater, he needs to step up, step out, and accept that it won't happen right away, or even ever. But FFS, don't whine about it and then not do anything about it.

I realize that most of this post is an angry overreaction, but we went through a similar issue with a large Facebook ad campaign recently. Our ads were being flagged constantly for something like "promising unlikely results", something that I'm sure is normally reserved for penis enlargement and get rich quick schemes. Our ads were for a launch promo where we offered a free gift with purchase. Somewhere along the lines Facebook equated our free gift with promising results that are not guaranteed.

The worst part wasn't that they mistakenly blocked our ads, but that they continued to do it. My best guess is the campaign, landing page, or our advertising account was "flagged" which made subsequent ads more likely to be blocked. We changed and tested everything in the ad and the landing page, completely rewriting it and not even mentioning the free gift. Every time we would get blocked for the same reason, then our appeal would come back "sorry, we didn't mean to block your ad."

We spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, over $20k/mo. As much as people like to belabor Google for not providing product support, when you spend money with them (AdWords) their support is top notch. Facebook has a long ways to go in that regard.

It's most likely the phrase Burlesque which is tripping the sensors (censors?). Burlesque has a very specific sexual connotation which is easy to associate as being against their T&C as presented in this article.

I don't believe, though, that something like Burlesque should be prohibited by the same rules which are designed to prevent dildos from appearing in ads, but I imagine it's a side effect of Facebook being an American company and many of its users sharing our prudish sensibilities when it comes to sex.

The way I see it, Facebook is at the forefront of this immense issue humanity at large is going to eventually have to deal with, one way or another. How do you actually connect people to each other electronically? It's tremendously hard to do. Abstractions leak. Domain concepts fall apart. There's no way to reliably engineer legibility of data.

Used to be, we had a postal system whereby the problems were handled directly by humans. That's flat-out impossible here. Automation, policies to ensure legibility, these things are necessary because you can't build a social network without them and scale it across the globe. But since they affect humans and their lives, they have real human costs.

This is what happens when the public expect Facebook to be the morality police. Morality is subjective. Decisions can't be kept consistent and made to scale. Some will fall on the wrong side of close calls; it's inevitable.

Whilst some would allow children at a burlesque - others would look at the crotch level shot of dancers in frilly knickers that fronts the video ad for the burlesque show and consider that Facebook are spot on. It's not "morality police" it's just sticking with a pre-arranged definition of the boundaries of behaviour considered acceptable in a given forum. Those sufficiently mature to choose the boundaries of their exposure to sexualised content can get burlesque in other forums that have different defined boundaries. It's choice.

Would you do a burlesque show at a high-school?

It's not porn per se, but it is an "adult live show".

I don't think the public expects Facebook to be the morality police. Facebook believes being the morality police is in their best interest as they attempt to serve a central function in people's lives.

> I don't think the public expects Facebook to be the morality police.

So, users wouldn't be upset with Facebook if ads with sex toys started appearing on their homepage?

We absolutely expect them to censor their page to meet with our moral sensibilities, and complain loudly to the world when they do not.

Ironically, the comments section has a "Connect with Facebook" button.

I think these are legitimate concerns users of Facebook should have. However, these are really, really complex problems Facebook is trying to deal with. They're not intentionally trying to fit subcultures into boxes, and their logic for understanding and appropriately handling the way their customers use their site is really complex. They're trying the best they can, and to encourage them to quit their jobs is really not the answer.

So the Morality Police of Facebook censors ads, and suddenly it's a big deal because it affects Jamie Zawinski?

Facebook, Google, Apple and any number of Silicon Valley companies have been playing Morality Police to the world for a years now, censoring ordinary peoples content because it doesn't hold up to puritanical American standards. I find that way more offensive than this particular incident.