Facebook: Propaganda and Ponzis? OK. Open Source Blockchain Tools? No, thank you.
It was the last day of January 2018 when Facebook first banned ads for ICOs and cryptocurrencies, and don’t get me wrong, for all the right reasons. The ads were getting deceptive and projects were not delivering, Facebook was blamed for bad investment decisions.
We were well aware of the issues the ICO market had, so we put together a team of 30 blockchain developers to build out the products for many of the projects that had raised funds or still getting ready for their ICOs.
Within a few months, we had built several products, reformed to MouseBelt Blockchain Accelerator, and spent several hundred thousand dollars to create open-source blockchain development tools to help the cryptocurrency market mature and help real use-cases evolve.
It was the summer of 2018, we had finished our first batch of tools, a multi-coin block explorer, mobile wallet and native SDKs, a KYC Dashboard, pushed them open to GitHub under MIT license for everyone to fork and use as they wished.
Great news, June 26, 2018, Facebook is reversing a part of their cryptocurrency ad ban to allow legitimate products and services to be advertised. We jump on the opportunity to get our tools in front of developers on Facebook.
By the title of this article, you can already assume what went down now. Our ads immediately get “Not approved”. Do bear in mind that our ads are neutrally toned and the text-to-image ratio is approved.
We apply for the special approval to run ads for cryptocurrency related products and services with the form Facebook provides for this case. A couple of days of waiting, we get a reply. (On the picture is one of our last attempts, so it went on for months)
Licensing or registration for our open-source tools we’re not making any money on? We go through the same application 5 more times, each time simplifying our explanation further. By our last attempt to date, we’re at a level of assumption the person on the other end just connected to the world-wide-web for the first time, and it’s a full A4 page long.
We even explain that our blockchain accelerator business is no different from any the other accelerators who can happily advertise on their platform. We really tried to cover anything that could still fuel doubt.
We were cut off completely from Facebook. We threw a party at our San Francisco office during SF Blockchain Week and shot a video of it, we could not even boost the video on Facebook. The video did not even have a call to action or a link attached.
The whole thing is made even more ridiculous by fake news websites continuously being able to run ads on Facebook to promote pure Ponzi schemes that promise profits in just 5 minutes.
Today’s landscape for cryptocurrency related activities seems to only be possible with “warming up” your ad account with simple worthless articles and blending your blackhat articles and ads in-between like a blackhat marketer.
Giving very little confidence in Facebook to be able to counter any propaganda on their platform.
Russian propaganda, White nationalist groups, “fun” surveys that steal your data, all still happily exist on Facebook, just not MouseBelt Blockchain Accelerator’s ads for free tools.
Yes, we are victims in this scenario, but that’s not the kind of mindset we live by. We take the “L” for now and look for other channels to impact the community.
Some of the things we’ve achieved in the past few months without Facebook:
• Sponsoring 12 university blockchain programs across the US
• Sponsoring multiple blockchain hackathons across the US, and even having a team win 3rd place at Dallas Blockchain and HackDFW’s Proof of Hack, using our open source SDK.
• Invested in young founders to help them build their dreams
Best of all, our website is in TOP 3 on Google for “blockchain accelerator”. Unfortunately, open source blockchain development tools are not searched on Google or GitHub as much as we’d like, so we do need some form of social advertising for those.
If you happen to have any ideas, how we could raise awareness of our open source tools or have connections at Facebook to get us approved. Please hit me up on LinkedIn or let us know in the comments.
