I think it’s creepy how unavailable actual human help has become. For the average person, it’s a dig to find a way to get in contact with anyone inside the most famous internet companies.

Imagine how powerful Twitter would be if an actual human answered a help desk phone? Or your direct emails? Or dms?

I realize reply emails, even when from a nonbot human entity, are not exactly warm and fuzzy and might be costly, but it would be a huge perk for users when problems arise, or if they need advertising help or assistance from being harassed online. A trained team (maybe small army) to take emails or DMs and try their best at customer service.

Instead, it’s always, “Look at this FAQ!” Or worse, you are sent to a “HELP” center where you type in your problem amidst volumes of other “solutions.”

The plight that brought me to this was a simple question about advertising with Facebook. As a sort of hobby, I run fan pages for all kinds of stuff, and sometimes I get “gifted” pages because the current creators/admins are tired of running them.

That’s how I got a page for lesbians over 30, from a very specific news channel, with which I found gratifying to work with. That was not the exact theme or page name, but I’m leaving it out because it’s not what this article is about.

Occasionally, I’ll spend small amounts of money to advertise something, mostly after I study the analytics I find interesting, and also to drive traffic to one destination or another.

Anyway, so I keep running into this problem where advertising was blocked as sexually explicit. And this page is not that kind of page.

To give you an idea, the last time it happened, it was a post for “walking group” for lesbians in their 60s. It was a great post that performed organically so well, I wanted to try to boost it, too.

Nope. A red bar comes up, and the notice reads, “Your Boosted Post May Not Be Approved. Your boosted post can’t promote sexual or adult products or services. Consider boosting a different post. Read about our Advertising Policies.”

It also happened on a post about Harvey Milk. In fact, it now happens every time, no matter what content is posted.

When you click on the policies, there is nothing in them to suggest walking groups are a violation  — so one must assume Facebook is choosing to block lesbian content simply because they say they’re lesbians?

When you search for “contact” in the help section, you get a literal circle of death. At least, I did.

And all I want to know is, why is Facebook banning content that should not be banned.