Facebook and Signal are fighting over an ad campaign

Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, found itself in a public dispute with communications app Signal this week over an ad campaign. The encrypted messaging service — a non-profit that rivals Facebook-owned WhatsApp — said in a blog on Tuesday that Facebook had blocked one of its ad campaigns on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. The campaign was designed to show Instagram users the amount of data that Instagram and parent firm Facebook collect on users.

“We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to,” Signal wrote. “The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer, which the advertising platform uses.” Signal used Instagram’s own adtech tools to target the ads at users. Here is example text of one of the ads from Signal: “You got this ad because you’re a teacher, but more importantly you’re a Leo (and single). This ad used your location to see you’re in Moscow. You like to support sketch comedy, and this ad thinks you do drag.”

Signal said that Facebook “wasn’t into that idea” and claimed that its ad account had been disabled as a result. “Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned,” Signal wrote. “In Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.” Facebook described the ad campaign as a stunt and claimed that Signal had never actually tried to run the Instagram campaign.

Facebook and Signal are fighting over an ad campaign. Here’s why, CNBC, May 7