When Facebook’s advertising team takes political correctness a bit too far …

Our startup, Medical Joyworks, has created a series of medical education apps targeted at healthcare professionals, with over 3 million downloads to date, and over a million active users.

Since recently, we’ve been using our Facebook Page as a marketing channel, and we’ve been experimenting with the use of ads — specifically ‘boosting’ posts on our page.

All ads posted on Facebook undergo a review before going ‘live’ — and for the most part, this has not been a problem at all.

However, we were rather surprised when Facebook rejected our latest ad, stating that ‘your ad wasn’t approved because it focuses on an ideal physical body image’. For reference, the ad in concern is shown below.

The relevant post (which we attempted to boost) can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/clinicalsenseapp/posts/922862387775232

Another of our ads ended up being rejected with the message ‘your ad wasn’t approved because the image violates Facebook’s advertising guidelines by promoting an idealized physical body image’.

As before, the original post can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/clinicalsenseapp/posts/922673611127443

Thinking that the ads might have been rejected in error, we reached out to Facebook Support.

As of writing, we’re just not sure whether it is worthwhile continuing with Facebook ads or not ….