Mood after seeing the predictable horror show on Facebook this morning.

For context, Facebook instituted a new policy where you had to get your ads to run at least once by 12:01 this morning as part of their blackout period leading up to the election. Why the blackout, when it's organic that's the problem?

Lots of progressive ads worked their tails off to follow all the rules and get their Facebook ads up. And then woke up this morning to them randomly shut off. It's been hours of no-spend due to their gross incompetence rolling out this complex and unnecessary policy.

Why is this a problem? Right now, 100s of thousands of dollars educating voters about how to vote safe and healthy are being burnt. Burnt as in we won't be able to spend that money because everything has been carefully budgeted. Burnt means money left in bank accounts on e-day.

We carefully followed all of Facebook's rules, even though it meant we couldn't serve up ads that tell people they have X days left to early vote. Even though we couldn't tell people when polls close on e-day b/c Facebook told us they would be rejected.

And then today we wake up to our Facebook ads being off and this sitting waiting to be served in Trump's ad library. After we were explicitly told you could not do date-specific ads, Trump's team decided to just do what it wanted, assuming Facebook wouldn't dare stop them.

If I am a little mad right now, you now know why. This was all self-inflicted by Facebook. And it is disproportionately harming the left.

It's also utterly predictable. Facebook's ad tech is notoriously buggy. They were trying to do something complex and new, which never goes well. Progressives are a bunch of do-gooders and we try and follow the rules. Trump DGAF. Meanwhile, money is getting burnt.

$10 says the Trump team saw "we encourage you" as not being an ironclad policy so they decided to test it. https://twitter.com/MeganClasen/status/1321139005434613765

In case you are wondering, no the ads are not back up. And no, Facebook has not told us when things will be fixed.

Oh and it's not as if this only affects ads that got placed right before the deadline. I've got one that's been live over a week that's now turned off randomly.

Update: My therapist now knows way more than he ever wanted to know about Facebook ad policy and their janky software.

You've got to be shitting me. https://twitter.com/JessReports/status/1321202013883936768

In case you are wondering, there are still lots of ads that Facebook has not turned back on. This is outrageous.