It looks as if there was a surprising increase in Count.cgi from 1 Feb to
1 Apr. Was somebody virally spreading my URL's because they were
so impressed with the brilliant political analysis?
The answer is yes and no; there was indeed a viral upsurge of interest, but
oddly enough most of the internet addresses were from outside the US.
Why would foreigners suddenly care about my thoughts on American politics?
It turns out the sudden interest was
botnet attacks on wp-login.php.
I don't use WordPress or any other php scripts - and as my web pages show,
I'm a /usr/ucb/vi kind of guy anyway.
So the attacks were ineffective except for adding
meaningless boost to the Count.cgi numbers.
My firewall blocks wp-login.php attack IP's anyway since those bots
might be up to some other wickedness in the future.
The upsurge in attacks and unique attacking IP's was notable after I started
my Facebook ad campaign in November:
| Month | Attacks | Unique IP's |
| Oct | 24 | 15 |
| Nov | 1187 | 1165 |
| Dec | 4658 | 4549 |
| Jan | 5896 | 5013 |
| Feb | 4228 | 3859 |
| Mar | 41001 | 10774 |
| Apr | 15954 | 5307 |
| May | 8962 | 4256 |
| Jun | 3153 | 3071 |
The surge in March - two months after advertising ended in January - is puzzling. I had to modify my homebrew malware filtering to automatically filter out wp-login.php attempts without human intervention, so I could inspect the more interesting intrusion attempts manually.
Second Facebook Advertising Adventure - boosting posts
revised 1 May 2018
https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/ is the Facebook version of the political-scrapbook.net website. The Posts section contains bite-size portions (some bigger bites than others) of topics in political-scrapbook.net. The Facebook page has had its ups and downs, as explained below, which is why there are big gaps in posts and comments.
As an experiment, I responded to Facebook's invitation to "boost" (advertise) posts by authorizing $20 each for several posts over a week's time. Here are the results; entries such as 5/6 April mean posted 5 April, boosted 6 April; 10/9 mean that 10 was the total number and 9 was the number Facebook attributes to the paid boost; all are set to go off boost on 14 April 2018: The target audience was US women aged 30-64 interested in the Democratic Party: 13,000,000 users.
Here the boost experiment posts are listed here in reverse chronological order:
- "Reach" is the number of views of the post
- "Reactions" is the number of emoticon responses
- "Comments" is the number of comments on the post
- "Shares" is the number of shares of the post
- "Clicks" is the number of clicks on links cited in the post.
- "Score" is Facebook's relevance score for boosted posts
- "Hide" is the number of negative "Hide Post" responses
- "Hide All" is the number of negative "Hide All Posts" responses
| Title | Post Boost | Reach | Like | Love | Haha | Wow | Sad | Angry | Comments | Shares | Clicks | Hide | Hideall | Spam | Ratio | Score Cost | Topic |
| Personal Change Leading to Social Change |
2018-04-13
2018-04-14 |
2196
2005 |
9
1 | 2 |
3
3 |
211
109 | 9 |
9
18 | other | ||||||||
| Local Journalism - ignore it and it will go away |
2018-04-12
2018-04-14 |
1420
1046 | 6 | 1 |
6
3 |
46
23 | 24 |
7
87 | journalism | ||||||||
| You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown |
2018-04-09
2018-04-13 |
1347
1265 | 3 |
1
1 | 1 |
50
19 | 1 | 1 | 23 |
8
105 | theory | ||||||
| Trump Administration bravely defends your right to make |
2018-04-09
2018-06-03 |
4180
3369 | 128 | 2 | 8 | 97 |
11
7 |
49
45 |
361
98 | 7 |
8
23 | economics | |||||
| Don't make it easier for the Republicans to retain control |
2018-04-09
2018-06-03 |
3103
3043 |
45
3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 16 |
26
11 |
13
12 |
310
246 | 1 | 7 |
9
15 | election | |||
| Middle America Reboots Democracy |
2018-04-09
2018-06-03 |
3434
3263 | 26 | 1 |
22
4 |
5
5 |
320
220 | 9 |
8
21 | theory | |||||||
| Reproductive Rights, #MeToo, and the 2018 primaries |
2018-04-07
2018-06-03 |
3072
2981 | 3 | 1 |
12
9 |
2
1 |
214
31 | 13 |
9
159 | election | |||||||
| Civil Forfeiture - guilty until you are proven innocent |
2018-04-05
2018-04-13 |
2971
2298 |
21
2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 14 | 3 |
18
12 |
301
86 | 1 | 8 |
8
23 | other | ||
| How much would you sell your personal information for? |
2018-04-05
2018-04-13 |
1686
1593 |
6
1 | 1 | 4 |
2
1 |
139
96 | 11 |
7
21 | technology | |||||||
| Middle America Reboots Democracy - Putnam and Skocpol |
2018-04-03
2018-04-13 |
413
342 | 2 |
28
16 | 13 |
-
42 | theory | ||||||||||
| What Happens When You Fast-Track a Tax Bill? |
2018-04-03
2018-06-03 |
2803
2516 |
59
1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 37 |
11
4 |
16
13 |
202
35 | 1 | 1 | 9 |
9
70 | tax | ||
| #MeToo - The Political Issue of the Century? |
2018-04-01
2018-04-13 |
604
517 | 44 | 1 |
8
3 |
5
5 |
27
47 | 7 |
6
43 | politics | |||||||
| The Most ... Candidate WHO CAN WIN |
2018-03-30
2018-06-03 |
1501
2109 | 9 | 1 |
3
12 |
147
56 | 9 |
8
48 | election | ||||||||
| Consistency of Republican Word and Deed |
2018-03-30
2018-06-03 |
1890
2887 | 12 | 1 |
1
9 |
4
37 |
285
142 | 6 |
9
15 | politics | |||||||
| Who decides who is elected to Congress in 2018? |
2017-12-28
2018-04-13 |
2591
2459 | 17 | 2 |
5
2 | 2 |
288
79 | 8 |
10
25 | election |
One lesson I infer from the data so far is that sensational and polemical posts get more Facebook readership than thoughtful and educational ones.
The experiment was encouraging enough that I started boosting some more posts after April 15, until Facebook revised its political advertising policies effective May 22 for new boosts and June 4 for already-running ones.
Third Facebook Advertising Adventure - getting locked out
revised 29 May 2018
Your Facebook page is now read-only - security
One of the unexpected benefits of being a Facebook advertiser is that one can be locked out of his account for several days at a time. You and everybody else can read existing content, but you can't change anything. This has happened to politicalscrapbooknet several times over two months, most notably for over a week while the tax bill was receiving its final hacks of passage in Congress.
Facebook notifies you that (unspecified) unusual activity in your account raises (unspecified) security issues, and you need to send a photo for verification (how this helps is unspecified), but you will be notified when the issue is resolved (how long this might be is unspecified). During this time you are locked out of your account and can't change anything or post anything. Although they say they will let you know when the security review is complete, they don't, and you have to keep trying to log in every day until it works again. That might take a couple of days or a week or more. During that time they continue to send you cheery messages about "a lot has happened in your account since you logged in."
Your Facebook page is now disabled
On 25 Feb 2018, a family member told me that my politicalscrapbooknet page could no longer be found. Nobody could read it and I couldn't log in. When I tried, I got:
As far as I know, I wasn't doing any of the things Facebook forbids. So I filed an appeal to find out what I did wrong. No response as of 8 March, so I submitted another appeal. Never got a response, but on 20 March, the page was visible again. One thing that might have been a factor was that I might have accidentally blocked some email from facebook. I revised my homebrew malware prevention about the time I started getting facebook updates again.Account Disabled
Your account has been disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.
I wasn't done yet, though. When I had time, I posted some new comments and asked family members if my page and posts were visible again. They said no. A google search for clues led me to discover that the page had been set to unpublished - perhaps by Facebook while my login was disabled. There is a settings page and a Page Visibility option that had to be changed to Page Published. I did that and now the page seems to be live again. Live and learn.
Your Facebook ad is disapproved - discriminatory target
Facebook can also block your ad offering housing, employment, or credit, if it determines that you have targeted the audience in a discriminatory fashion. One of these political ads was blocked on that basis. Facebook unblocked it after I appealed. They never specified what about the ad warranted blocking nor why it turned out OK on appeal. Indeed, being political advocacy, the ad offered no housing, employment, or credit, indeed no goods or services at all. Perhaps the Facebook policy is a new response to an investigation by New York Times and ProPublica into age discrimination in employment advertising.
Your Facebook ad is disapproved - violates Advertising Policies
On 6 April, after being active for several hours, the post about fast-tracking the tax bill was disapproved for boosting. Facebook said:
Your ad wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our Advertising Policies. We don't allow ads that contain shocking, disrespectful or sensational content, including ads that depict violence or threats of violence.I couldn't find anything shocking, disrespectful, sensational, or violent, so I changed "schmuck" to "wage-earner" and asked them to review it again. The next day it was approved and they were charging me again. As usual, no explanation of how it fell out of favor or how it fell back in favor.
How to fix: We suggest removing this type of content from your ad and/or using a different image or video.
Your Facebook ad is disapproved - improper reference to Facebook or Instagram
On 7 April, a post about Middle America Reboots Democracy was disapproved for boosting. Facebook said:
Your ad wasn't approved because it includes an improper reference to Facebook or Instagram in the text or an image of a Facebook or Instagram brand asset, which doesn't follow our Advertising Policies.I think this was the objectionable part:
How to fix: Edit your ad to follow our brand guidelines.
A few days ago, a posting on this facebook page #MeToo - The Political Issue of the Century? discussed the high-level political effect of Trumpism,But Facebook wasn't done with that post. On 8 April, I got a message
From: "Facebook Ads Team" Subject: Your Ad Could Be Performing Much Better Your ad's image contains text which is affecting its delivery. Click any of the links below to manage your ad, and make changes to reduce the amount of text in your ad's image to improve its performance The following ad needs your attention Boosted Post: Post: "Middle America Reboots Democracy - Putnam and Skocpol"
You can find several websites that explain how to use Open Graph to tell Facebook which thumbnail to use for your site. What you can't find is a way to tell Facebook which thumbnail to use for a site that belongs to somebody else. That restriction is a recent change to fight fake news, so I applaud it, if effective. You're still allowed to add multiple thumbnails on your Facebook page, but you are not allowed to get rid of the one Facebook chose from the site itself.
I finally gave up and started a new ad with a different first URL from which Facebook extracted a different thumbnail photo which I hope is more acceptable. Perhaps the moral is: be sure the thumbnail photo is satisfactory before launching the ad.
Your Post Wasn't Boosted
Facebook thought one of my posts was doing so well it should be boosted:
Boost Your PostBut when I tried, using the same parameters as previous posts that day:
Your post is performing better than 95% of other posts on your Page. Boost it now to reach even more people.
Your Post Wasn't BoostedNo further explanation available. Facebook's help pages suggest clearing the history from your browser. That didn't help. They also suggested a different browser, so I switched hardware, operating system, and browser to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer, and that didn't help either. I tried re-entering the text as a new post. That didn't help either. That 95% rating seemed to be the kiss of death. Then the same thing happened with another post that wasn't marked as performing above 95%. I tried to boost it and got the same vague error message. Other posts earned boost recommendations from Facebook, but when I tried boosting those and some others, Facebook would not boost them.
Sorry, but we're having trouble boosting your post and are working to solve the problem. Please try again.
I complained on the online help center, and eventually received the following words of comfort:
We received your report and appreciate your patience as we work to fix technical problems on Facebook. Though we can't update everyone who submits a report, we're using your feedback to improve the Facebook experience for everyone.Translation: we won't tell you what's wrong and we might not change anything.
Some other advice from the web suggested promoting a post directly from the Ads Manager. That failed with this enlightening message:
"Page Does Not Have Domain Advertising Permission: Your Page does not have permission to run ads for the domain www.washingtonpost.com. Reach out to the domain owner to get permission."And indeed, it looks like the posts that can boost do not have links to the Post. So this page's posts will not boost the Post. But why couldn't Facebook say that right up front instead of suggesting that they are "working on it?"
I previously was able to boost posts with links to the Post, but that stopped around 16 April. It took a couple of weeks to stumble on the solution.
Can't Edit Boosted Post
I normally think of something I should change just after I create a post, especially if I immediately boost it. Sometimes after you boost a post, you can edit it... and sometimes you can't. While it is in review prior to approval for boosting, the Edit Post option is not display on the ... dropdown menu. After approval, sometimes you can edit, and sometimes not. Pausing the boost doesn't seem to help. In any case, if you do modify a boosted post, it will go through another review cycle.
If you're stuck, the simplest solution seems to be to cancel the boost. Then you can re-edit the post and reboost. You lose any interaction that might have occurred to the original post.
No proprietary formats
Some boosts were rejected, after a long time to review, and sometimes after being successfully boosted for several days - with a generic reminder that certain kinds of URL's aren't allowed in ads. There's a long list of reasonable restrictions - URL has to be viewable, no pop-ups, etc. - and then other restrictions such as no proprietary formats (e.g. .pdf or .doc). I removed pdf references from the posts in question and they were then successfully boosted again. These were typically academic articles providing the research informing opinions expressed in earlier citations in the post. I hadn't thought of pdf as very proprietary, and wonder why it's permitted in some boosted posts some of the time.
Low Quality or Disruptive Content
Another way that posts get rejected is for Low Quality or Disruptive Content in external pages linked in the ad. This can happen after the ad has been running for a while. In this case, the offending page seemed to be https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/george-will-mike-pence-replaces-trump-as-the-worst-person-in-government although it was hard to be sure, since Facebook's rejection doesn't specify which external link is the problem. Other posts containing Washington Examiner links have been successfully boosted. So I deleted the Washington Examiner link, and the boost was still rejected. Next I tried removing all the external links and relying on text, just to see whether that would work; it seems to have been successful. So the problem does seem to have something to do with the links, and not with words like "impeach" in the text.
Then I tried boosting the same post with no links except a link to my Facebook post that had the objectionable external links. Not only did that work, but at the same time, a lot of the other boosts that had been under review for over a week were approved. Some of them had "impeach" in the text, so that wasn't the issue. But the net result is that there are a several duplicate or near-duplicate posts on the page, on the subjects of impeachment, Pence, and income taxes.
Facebook has launched a new authorization process for political advertisers that is quite intrusive and requires giving Facebook a lot of personal information. That may be necessary to reduce Facebook's legal and political liability but it's more information than I'd trust a social media company to keep confidential, especially a Chinese one. Per the new policy, starting May 22 there were no more new unauthorized political ads, and starting June 4, existing unauthorized political ads were disabled. That's just as well for me; it's time to get back to useful productive work.
Promoting Bitcoin, binary options, or cryptocurrencies
A post on the business cycle was rejected for violating an advertising policy against promoting Bitcoin, binary options, or cryptocurrencies. As far as I could tell, the problem paragraph was
Bitcoin bubblemania might be a canary-in-a-coal-mine, reminiscent of the self-referential and self-leveraging peaks of the internet bubble of 2000 and the subprime mortgage bubble of 2008. But leverage works going down as well as going up.So I tried editing it to
The self-referential and self-leveraging peaks of the internet bubble of 2000 and the subprime mortgage bubble of 2008 remind us that leverage works going down as well as going up.Perhaps that did the trick; the ad was eventually approved.
Not Authorized for Ads with Political Content
Although all my ads were posted by the deadline of May 21 and not modified thereafter, a few were rejected on the basis of political content:
- Time to talk about something else
- Can Democrats ever address the Trump base?
- When did the Democrats become the party of Fiscal Responsibility?
Not Authorized for Ads with Political ContentSome ads were disabled for that reason, and then re-enabled without any action on my part. So I did nothing about these and hoped for the best.
Your ad was not approved because your Page has not been authorized to run ads with political content.
What to do: Complete the authorization process.
If you've read our policies and think that we made a mistake, you can request a second review by our team.
Promoted Object Is Missing
with an error message:
Promoted Object Is Missing:I couldn't tell what to do with those, since both ads listed multiple URL's of web pages to boost.
You must select an object to promote that is related to your objective, for example a Page post, website URL, or app.
Please add a promoted object and try again.
(fbtrace_id: HqktcRG/HES)
Server Down
Evidently Facebook's statistical services for advertisers fail from time to time:
Link Removal
Moskowitz LLP didn't appreciate links from political-scrapbook to their website, so they asked for them to be removed. They no longer seem to make an explicit point, in their radio ads or website, about consulting on the qualified business deduction and other obscurities of the new tax law.
Facebook Will Be Back Soon
Facebook went down unexpectedly with the message:
Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you're seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site.After several hours, an investigation revealed it wasn't just me: I never found out what happened.
Then the next day, there was a different kind of error "Failed to update pinpost" with the message:
Error when trying to update the page's pin post. Please try again later.That one didn't last as long.
Conclusion
Presumably all the imagined violations were first detected and punished automatically by artificial intelligence algorithms, and then my appeals had to be handled manually by humans. If so, then social media companies will have to incorporate the cost of all those post checkers and appeal judges into their business models.
| Title | Post Boost | Reach | Like | Love | Haha | Wow | Sad | Angry | Comments | Shares | Clicks | Hide | Hideall | Spam | Ratio | Score Cost | Topic |
| MS runoff - very fine people, on both sides? |
2018-11-23
2018-11-26 |
3840
3026 | 46 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 14 |
78
26 |
16
12 |
237
133 | 3 | 10 |
9
75 | election | ||
| MS runoff - it's not just about Trump |
2018-11-21
2018-11-26 |
3672
3121 | 66 | 12 | 5 | 2 | 20 |
87
37 |
15
13 |
377
301 | 1 | 6 |
9
33 | election | |||
| Evolution of Republican Identity - for MS runoff voters |
2018-11-18
2018-11-26 |
2570
2052 | 81 | 9 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
16
9 |
25
17 |
209
182 | 1 | 7 |
8
55 | election | |||
| Words from Washington to McCain -for MS runoff voters |
2018-11-18
2018-11-26 |
2623
2154 | 68 | 14 | 1 | 4 |
51
15 |
20
18 |
227
178 | 1 | 7 |
8
56 | election | ||||
| There is no immigration strategy in the middle |
2018-11-05
2018-11-06 |
5689
5366 | 70 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 16 |
107
40 |
21
10 |
190
173 | 1 | 2 | 14 |
8
58 | election | |
| A Cross of Gilt |
2018-11-05
2018-11-06 |
7776
7018 | 89 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 54 |
28
12 |
46
23 |
353
644 | 15 |
10
16 | election | ||||
| Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps |
2018-11-05
2018-11-06 |
9185
8588 | 73 | 8 |
14
9 |
37
31 |
114
84 | 1 | 1 | 38 |
7
119 | election | |||||
| Should leaders be role models for youth? |
2018-11-04
2018-11-06 |
18570
16992 | 282 | 7 | 4 | 13 | 34 | 96 |
310
94 |
62
46 |
1801
1635 | 3 | 2 | 7 |
9
24 | election | |
| Political Scrapbook Related Websites |
2018-11-04
2018-11-06 |
9061
9118 | 6 | 1 |
86
77 | 1 | 96 |
5
130 | politicalscrapbooknet | ||||||||
| Why are these Republicans voting for Democrats? |
2018-11-02
2018-11-06 |
15784
13048 | 536 | 50 | 6 | 7 | 9 | 14 |
269
87 |
167
103 |
1575
1153 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 6 |
9
31 | election |
| From Washington's Farewell Address - |
2018-10-30
2018-11-06 |
8820
8052 | 58 | 2 |
10
6 |
48
37 |
121
82 | 37 |
8
122 | democracy | |||||||
| Conversion of a party of ideas to a cult of personality - |
2018-10-27
2018-11-06 |
21176
18788 | 316 | 4 | 28 | 10 | 37 | 40 |
330
79 |
146
97 |
988
694 | 6 | 4 | 11 |
8
58 | theory |
Facebook Advertising Futures
revised 10 April 2018
The lockout experiences described above probably reflect fast automatic blocking by artificial algorithms and then a slower human appeals process that involves somebody somewhere actually looking at the content and deciding if it's OK. It's hard to imagine any other method of blocking harmful content and fake contributors, but it tends to undermine the business proposition of social media by making the human labor content a significant part of the cost to be borne by advertisers - or users.
- Facebook has finally published its internal censorship guide. Everybody agrees some content should be censored. They just don't agree on which content.
- David Ignatius: is optimistic that market forces will tend to correct social media company excesses - after all, Russia and China need less government control of social media, not more. But he's pessimistic about the greater threat of fake information distributed instantly and worldwide.
- Will Facebook's proposed new policy to verify posters of political ads make things better or worse?
- One wonders what the effect of Facebook's new news feed algorithm would have been on the politicalscrapbooknet ad campaigns.
- One wonders what the effect of Facebook's new news feed algorithm will be on Facebook revenues.
- Geoffrey Fowler suggests that Facebook should be regarded as a public utility for which you pay so it doesn't need to sell your personal information to pay its bills.
- Do people have unrealistic expectations about making a living from social media?
- The change might make Facebook users more comfortable, but it's not likely to broaden their perspectives.
- Zuckerberg has received some advice from Roger McNamee.
- Just as nuclear chain reactions were too consequential a technology for Fermi to exclusively control, social media are too consequential for Zuckerberg to exclusively control.
Political Advertising on Social Media
revised 14 November 2019
Twitter announced that it would reject all political and issue advertising starting 22 Nov 2019. The issues of censorship vs suppression of falsehoods just seem intractable.
So far Facebook has not take a similar stance. One possible approach would be for it to limit micro-targeting of political and issue ads, the same way Facebooks limits housing, employment, and credit ads to prevent illegal discrimination. So, for instance, Facebook could decide that political and issue ads can only be targeted geographically by whole states and territories, and would go to all adults in those states and territories. That would probably destroy the economic incentive for those kinds of ads.
Instead, on 7 Nov 2019, Facebook suspended all ads that don't follow new guidelines:
Begin Creating New "Paid for by" DisclaimersFrom the link, we learn
This ad can't run because you'll need to complete the new disclaimer process. We've strengthened our disclaimer requirements for ads about social issues, elections and politics. All issue, electoral or political ads must now include disclaimers created using the new requirements. Learn more, here.
What you can do: From a desktop computer, go to Page > Settings > Authorizations to create a new disclaimer.
All information provided by the advertiser and confirmed by Facebook will be made publicly available in the Ad Library for 7 years. This includes street address, phone number, business email, website and FEC ID, if used.That seems to imply that the home phone, street address, and email become public for all political advertisers. Considering the numbers of crazies and malcontents on the internet, that seems to be a rather high risk for individuals, so there won't be any more paid political advertising from politicalscrapbooknet.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
revised 7 March 2020
Facebook's recent disclosure requirements on political ads, mentioned above, seemed onerous enough, but perhaps not for everybody.
Yet it seems likely that Facebook will be forced soon enough to join Twitter in banning political ads because of the insurmountable problems they present.
Anyway, it's not clear that social media political ads are good for much except rallying the troops who are already convinced. The intent of politicalscrapbooknet's advertising was to reach persuadable voters who hadn't made up their minds. There's no evidence that succeeded.
As far as attracting an expanding loyal reader base, political advertising goosed politicalscrapbooknet from nothing in Nov 2017 to 742 Like and 754 Follow in June 2018. Almost two years later in March 2020 it's hardly changed at 733 Like and 746 Follow. Loyal, but not expanding. At least it worked way better than the Twitter campaign mentioned above.
With that in the background, imagine my surprise on 24 Feb to receive a bill for $647 for political ads placed 11 Nov 2017 to 8 Jan 2018 - over two years earlier.
I immediately complained and got this helpful automated response
I'm sorry you're having trouble with your Facebook ad account. It's look = like you've contacted the incorrect team for this issue. Please fill out = the form in the link below so we can make sure your request gets routed to = the appropriate team: www.facebook.com/help/contact/...which was for Policy Disabled Ad Account Help. While my account was restricted (is that the same as disabled or deactivated?) when I didn't comply with the new disclosure requirements, that was irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I found another place to complain and got an actual helpful response from an actual person. Dmitri investigated, confirmed my complaint, and got the charge reversed the same day. Thank you Dmitri!
Not wanting to go through this again, I wanted to delete my credit card number. But I couldn't modify my account because it was restricted. So on 28 Feb, Dmitri suggested I unrestrict myself at another link that led to Restricted Advertising Access. It asked "Please tell us why you should be allowed to advertise". At this point I was ready to deactivate my advertising account completely, so I answered that I didn't want to advertise, I just wanted to deactivate. In the fullness of time - 4 Mar - I got an automated response that my advertising access was incorrectly disabled and had been re-enabled.
First I did try again to delete the credit card, but I couldn't do that because I was told to check that my ads were all paid for - referring to a link on my ad account page that didn't seem to exist. Of course, I didn't want to advertise, I wanted to de-activate. So I hit the de-activate button. And was again advised that Facebook would have to check that my ads had been paid for before it could process the de-activation. One might think that would require a few microseconds, but on 6 Mar they are still checking. Finally I noticed on 7 Mar that the account had been de-activated. I didn't get any notice directly from Facebook.
Not wanting to take any more chances, by then I had cancelled the credit card in question at the issuer. I got a new credit card which I will use exclusively for internet providers that insist on periodic or random automatic payments.
Tweets
revised 7 Dec 2020
Although no matter worthy of decision at the presidential level can be adequately discussed in 280 characters, that doesn't stop the tweeter-in-chief, and finally I decided to join in for a while as an experiment. Some Facebook posts got a corresponding tweet, usually condensed.
Then I tried the Beta of "Promote Mode" which was supposed to get you about 33 new follows per month for $99. After a month, I got three follows, one of which dropped out, for an average cost of $33 or $49.50 depending on how you look at it. Twitter said it promoted 141 tweets to reach 19209 accounts resulting in 89 profile visits. I cancelled the service after one month.
I tweeted priority Facebook posts through December 2019. Everything on Twitter had already appeared on Facebook. I then stopped tweeting for a while.
In August 2020 I started tweeting links to interesting journalism. Then I'd batch those up on a daily basis and post that on Facebook. The difference from before was that these items showed up first on Twitter. Facebook was reserved for long posts with more original content, plus the daily batches of tweets.
Social Media Technical Adventures
revised 21 May 2021
At the bottom of a typical Facebook post or Twitter tweet like these
- https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1408449849499530
- https://twitter.com/politicalscrap1/status/1392237196158009344
When the post or tweet contains more than one external link, which one is chosen? That's an interesting question, not easily resolved, but a question for another day.
It used to be that my simple unadorned web pages were treated the same - one of the photos was used, and a title and summary extracted from the top of the web page. Then that stopped without notice and posts referring to my own websites got very plain previews like
- https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1390049191339596
- https://twitter.com/politicalscrap1/status/1390374199215067137
At first I thought it was because I wasn't encrypting my websites (https: instead of http:) so I went through a learning process involving
apache httpd-ssl.conf and Let's Encrypt using getssl
You can also get hints on securing your server at
https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/You'll need to know the version of your server and SSL that you are using.
When all of that was sort of working, my life was more complicated - Let's Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days - but nothing changed as far as previews and cards. But the effort was necessary anyway because other hosts were not pleased with my ancient versions of OpenSSL and apache and sendmail.
Recently I decided to try again to see if I could understand the mechanism. I quickly found that the first step is to set up some meta data tags in the header of each web page. For instance, political-scrapbook.net now has
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.political-scrapbook.net/"/> <meta property="og:type" content="website"/> <meta property="og:title" content="Political Scrapbook"/> <meta property="og:description" content="Observations on politics and related matters - a discursive scrapbook"/> <meta property="og:image" content="https://www.political-scrapbook.net/img/encyclopedia-std.jpg"/> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@politicalscrap1" />The og: properties are from Open Graph. Twitter kindly uses most of the same ones as Facebook, but it has a few of its own. But how did I know which meta data to set up? Facebook and Twitter have developer web pages that promise to help Many other people have tried to explain this, such as
- https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes
- https://louisem.com/217438/twitter-image-size
So I put the meta data between <head> and </head> - and nothing changed. Fortunately there are test sites to help debug -
- https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- There used to be https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator but Twitter quietly disabled the card validator preview feature, causing many people to search fruitlessly for bugs in their html, only to eventually learn the truth.
I had problems immediately. Facebook issued the following warning among many others -
Missing Properties
The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id
A little research reveals that this is expected, meaningless, and may be
ignored. But other things matter -
Facebook didn't like my incomplete certificates.
My certificates worked fine with sendmail and apache, but Facebook wouldn't
do anything until I completed them.
Fortunately help was available -
What's My Chain Cert?will generate what you need. Be sure to enter host name (www.political-scrapbook.net) rather than its URL (https://www.political-scrapbook.net). For Apache2, you put the full chain certificate in the same directory with your other SSL certificates and keys (/etc/apache2/certs in my case).
OK, so now you have your chain certificate. Now you have to add something like
SSLCertificateFile "/etc/apache2/certs/oakapple.net.chained.crt"to all your VirtualHosts.
Fiddling with SSL/TLS settings is easy to get wrong and hard to get right, but fortunately you have ways of checking the syntax at least, and discovering other bugs you never knew about -
/usr/apache2/bin/apachectl configtest or /usr/apache2/bin/httpd -t
That's just syntax though. At this point you should be worried about semantics and perhaps you've found
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.htmlto get ALL the bugs out of your SSL setup before facing Facebook again.
It takes a long time to finish, but right away you learn is that you don't have a
CAAset up.
You read up about that and follow the example and put it in your DNS zone file
oakapple.net IN CAA 0 issue "letsencrypt.org"And it still doesn't work. Then you see that the CAA should be at the end of the DNS zone file, so you move it and - it still doesn't work. If you're lucky you find
CAA Record Helperand Auto-Generate a CAA record, and reading down - discover that CAA records only work for BIND 9.9.6 and later. But no worries - they tell you what to do instead with earlier versions of BIND -
oakapple.net. IN TYPE257 \# 22 000569737375656C657473656E63727970742E6F7267Just as you might have guessed! Maybe I should install current BIND. A project for later.
So you put TYPE257 in, restart DNS, and go back to ssltest.
ssltest now complains that you are allowing vulnerable TLS protocols - v1 and v1.1 - and vulnerable ciphers. That won't do so now you have to fix your Apache configuration - /etc/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf in my case. It suffices to add
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!SSLv3:!kRSA SSLProxyCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!SSLv3:!kRSA SSLProtocol TLSv1.3 +TLSv1.2 SSLProxyProtocol TLSv1.3 +TLSv1.2and comment out any previous definitions. By the way, ssltest still takes a long time, but there's a faster way to check your protocols and ciphers -
https://www.cdn77.com/tls-testwill more quickly check just your protocols and ciphers to make sure that you are enabling TLS1.2 and TLS1.3 and disabling TLS1.1, TLS1.0, SSLv3, and SSLv2.
Likewise, from the command line -
nmap --script ssl-enum-ciphers -p 443 www.political-scrapbook.net | grep TLS
When you get tls-test and nmap straightened out, go back to ssltest. Incidentally, be sure to completely stop and restart your web server every time you change the configuration files. Otherwise you will not seem to be making any progress.
If there are no further issues with ssltest, go back to the Facebook and Twitter test sites. If you pass all the security checks, then you can start debugging why your image does not look the way you think it should.
Often it's because the aspect ratio is wrong. Twitter wants 1.91:1, preferably 1200x628. So you make a new version of your image with that ratio, more or less, and test again and find that it still doesn't work - because Facebook and Twitter have their own internal caching mechanisms and even though you can ask them to refresh, it doesn't always seem to work.
But by this time, you've either given up or learned patience. Think of it as a big Jenga game.
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