Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency

Source: Hacker News

Background

We manage millions of dollars in annual Meta ad spend—​not thousands. Our retail clients grow their businesses through Meta Ads, and for many of them it is their single most important growth channel. By any reasonable definition, we are a high‑value customer.

The Issue

For the past several months Meta has been treating us as if we don’t exist. The loop goes like this:

1. We hire a senior Paid Ads Specialist.
2. They set up a dedicated work account—a standard professional practice to keep work and personal accounts separate.
3. We upload their government ID for mandatory identity verification.
4. Within five minutes to ten hours the account is instantly banned.

We have done this with multiple specialists and social‑media managers. Every single one is banned before they have even opened an ad account or posted any content.

Why It Isn’t Our Fault

It’s understandable to suspect suspicious activity—​perhaps a pattern in logins or something off in the account setup. Meta’s security systems exist for a reason, and the natural assumption when “we keep getting banned” is that the user is doing something to deserve it.

However, we have been advertising on Facebook since the platform first opened to advertisers in 2008. Over that time we have spent millions of dollars, built a full billing and business‑identity history, and never exhibited any shady pattern or hidden behaviour. The problem appears to be a broken automated system that cannot distinguish between a bot farm and a professional creating a work account on their first day.

The Appeal Dead‑End

Meta’s standard response is to file an appeal through the Account Quality dashboard. The catch is that the appeal tool lives inside the very platform the specialist is locked out of—​you cannot appeal a login ban from behind a login screen.

We have tried every forum thread, concierge support contact, and support line we could find. The answers are consistently: “just create a new account” or “file an appeal.” Creating a new account simply results in another ban, often faster than the first. There is no clean slate, only the same automated system flagging the same professional as a threat repeatedly.

Business Impact

The consequences are real and compound quickly:

• Clients lose the specialists and managers they hired.
• Staff members, who have done nothing wrong, acquire a black mark attached to their identity documents across multiple banned accounts.
• We are forced to run campaigns and manage brand pages on a platform that could eliminate a key team member at any moment for no legitimate reason.

We have never encountered this problem with Google or TikTok.

Desired Solution

We need a simple, reliable fix:

• A manual onboarding pathway for verified agencies that does not collapse when an automated system makes a bad call.
• A human‑accessible support channel for login failures—​someone who can review an account and override the ban.
• An honest acknowledgement from Meta that its automated identity verification is generating false positives at scale for professional users.

Call to Action

If you are an agency owner who has hit the same wall, please share this. We are not the only ones, and the only way this gets fixed is if someone at Meta with actual authority decides it’s worth looking at.

If you work at Meta and are reading this, please email us at hello (at) our domain name.