18/04/2026
In July 2024, I got an unexpected message from Facebook saying this byFormica page had been restricted from advertising. No explanation was provided, no reason given.
The email was real (I checked), but made no sense to me, because I had not run Facebook ads in about two years.
I reviewed my account. No warnings. No rejected assets. No suspicious activity. I submitted an appeal anyway, and it was instantly rejected, making the advertising restriction permanent for our business.
So Meta/Facebook has effectively banned byFormica Ant Products from advertising, and they will not clearly tell me why. The explanation they do give is vague, and there is no path to any meaningful human review. I even subscribed to Meta Verified specifically to get human support, and their support agents still say they cannot tell me why this page was restricted, supposedly “for security reasons.”
That is why I’m making this post public.
Instead of manufacturing awesome ant food, I’m wasting hours and days of my life dealing with Facebook. And honestly, this feels like part of a much bigger problem. Everywhere around me, systems are failing. Companies that used to be reliable, almost like clockwork, now feel broken, indifferent, and impossible to deal with.
The USPS used to deliver small packages coast to coast in 3 days for about $3. Now it’s $5, and you’re lucky if it takes less than a week. I’ve had packages routed from Tennessee to Puerto Rico to California before finally being delivered to Missouri.
A FedEx drop box with a 3:30 pickup time is a gamble as to whether the driver will even pick up at all.
TurboTax and QuickBooks, both owned by Intuit, promise me one product, then force me into paying hundreds more because of a software glitch, which I then have to fight to get refunded.
The IRS website for changing my bank account sends me to a page that links back to itself in a loop, so you actually can’t change your bank account. Then when you call for help, the first person has to transfer you to another department with no direct number, and the call disconnects. Ten times. Ten-plus hours wasted.
This is what systemic failure looks like now: automated decisions, no accountability, paid support that can’t actually solve the problem, and giant companies that are perfectly comfortable wasting your time because fixing their systems would cost them more than ignoring you.
Meanwhile, I’m living in relative poverty and trying my damndest every day to make the highest-quality product I possibly can. I don’t get to be apathetic. I don’t get to shrug and move on. Competitors are appearing every day, ready to sell inferior products at a lower price, dressed up with mediocre AI images to polish the turd they otherwise couldn’t convince anyone to buy.
I worked my ass off and made real sacrifices for over a decade to make a sugar water for ants. And people are willing to pay a lot for it, not because I made outrageous or false product claims--but because it's a product that is reliable and that ants love.
Today, some kid in his parent's basement can make a crappy imitation using AI, price it $2 less on Amazon, and buy ads so their product appears before mine when customers search for my own brand name, taking half my income overnight while delivering an inferior product at every level.
And now one of the largest advertising platforms in the world has effectively locked my business out, without even telling me why.
I don’t know what I expect from posting this. But if you made it this far, maybe give this post a thumbs up so I know somebody out there is listening.
