Fighting the new commissars

Originally published by Israel Hayom

The time for a reckoning with the social media giants has arrived, and not only in the United States.

Earlier this week, Shibbolet Library, a new Israeli book publisher that specializes in conservative authors, launched a sales campaign on Facebook. The company invested approximately 100,000 shekels ($34,000) on Facebook ads to promote its book sales. Then suddenly, its account was blocked. The campaign was wrecked. The firm’s investment was lost.

Facebook, the corporate giant, replete with its anonymous work force and inscrutable algorithms scuppered the campaign with no prior warning or explanation.

Probably no explanation was necessary. This wasn’t Shibbolet’s first rodeo. Last April, Shibbolet Library launched another sales campaign on Facebook, at a cost of tens of thousands of shekels in Facebook ads. Then too, the nameless, faceless overlords of Facebook stopped the campaign in its tracks by freezing the firm’s Facebook account.

Shibbolet founder and CEO Rotem Sela recalls that he appealed the move seven times.

“It’s actually a bit Kafkaesque to say I appealed because I was never told what I was appealing. We were just selling books. We’re locked down with the coronavirus. All the book stores were closed. Facebook sales were and remain the most direct way for us to keep our business afloat and sell our books. What legitimate problem could Facebook possibly have with our efforts?”

After Sela’s seventh appeal, he was informed that Facebook had decided to permanently freeze Shibbolet’s account. Why? Why bother asking? No one was answering.

Given Facebook’s dominance of online markets, Shibbolet opened a new account, reluctantly forced to accept that it had lost all the client information stored on its previous, now permanently frozen account.

It was with the new account that Shibbolet launched its new campaign – only to be blocked once again.

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