Kingfish buys Facebook ads for the Hubba Hubba Revue shows, and every few months, Facebook decides that the ad is porn and pulls it. Then he writes them and says, "What the hell are you talking about??" and they reinstate it. Well, not this time. He tried to run an ad with this image in it:

And they say,

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. Ads for family planning and contraception are allowed if they follow our targeting requirements.

Before resubmitting your ad, please visit the Help Center to learn more and see examples of ads that meet our guidelines.

If you've read the guidelines in the Help Center and think your ad follows the rules and should have been approved, please let us know.

Gorilla suits: providing quality family planning and contraception for decades.

So then he thought, ok, someone at Facebook has found a way to fap to Gorilla X. He tried several other images with only faces in them, and eventually tried one using a Facebook-provided stock photo.

All blocked.

Every time you submit, you get a different Facebook contractor in whatever Third World, Grim Meathook Future call center they use today, which is always a wonderful crap-shoot. But since it's happening all the time now, that suggests that Facebook has decided that one of these triggers a porn blacklisting:

• The word "Burlesque"
• The words "Hubba Hubba"
• Kingfish's user account
• Or maybe some random-assed other thing?

It's not DNA Lounge in general, because we're running other DNA ads currently without problems, so far.

So we could do a bunch more experiments to try and narrow down precisely what is getting Facebook so hot and bothered that they will not take our money, but come on, what a fantastic waste of time and effort (and one likely to solve nothing but our curiosity, regardless).

Update: Remember I said that Kingfish tried posting the ad using one of the stock photos from the library that Facebook themselves provide for you to use in ads? It looked like this:


And Facebook wrote back:

Thanks for writing in. I'm here to help.

Your ad was rejected because the image doesn't follow our ad guidelines. Ads and there pages may not use overly sexual images, suggest nudity, show a lot of skin or cleavage, or focus unnecessarily on specific body parts.

It is their own photo! It is a face! Nary a gorilla to be seen.

Facebook is still, to this day, blocking people's accounts for not using their birth names -- I hear about another performer or DJ having their Facebook account locked for using their stage name pretty much daily.

Despite the fact that Facebook promised that they weren't going to do that any more.

Like I said last year:

Hey, remember when Facebook's hateful "real names" policy got a lot of press because they went nuclear on a bunch of drag queens? And then they put out a contentless, fawning press release with a fauxpology in it?

And remember when they then they got a ton of shamefully credulous press from people saying, "Well, that's all better then"?

And remember when people like me said, "You know, maybe you should save your applause for after they've changed either their official policy or their demonstrated behavior, or both, because they haven't", and nobody listened?

We will all be so much better off once Facebook finally craters into irrelevance, just like MySpace and Livejournal did before it. (Unless, you know, whatever replaces it is even worse, which is pretty likely.) But for now, Facebook has made itself sadly, tragically, despicably indispensable as a means of reaching customers.

They dictate morality while selling you out to the highest bidder; they erode your privacy more each day by moving the goal posts and daring you to keep up; and are constantly find a way to add some new bait-and-switch to interpose themselves between you and your friends and customers.

Fuck Facebook. They really are just the worst.

If you work there, I implore you to quit. I'm sure you can find a job working for a company that you don't have to apologize for all the time. You can do it. I believe in you.