My Facebook Page Was Penalized Over Private Messages — Here’s What Happened
I started a Facebook page earlier this year and honestly didn’t expect it to grow the way it did. Within a few months I reached around 80k followers, had multiple viral reels, and built a very active community that constantly commented and interacted with my posts.
At one point things were going incredibly well. One reel passed 3 million views and another post reached almost 30k reactions overnight. People were genuinely enjoying the content and engaging with it every day.
Then on April 20, my page suddenly lost recommendations for “hate speech, segregation, and dehumanization.”
The weird part is that my page had absolutely nothing political or offensive on it. I mainly posted AI-generated dreamlike landscape reels, but not just random AI spam. I actually spent time editing the material, adding music, improving the visuals, adjusting pacing, and trying to make the videos feel cinematic. I also properly labeled my content as AI-generated, and I see hundreds of pages with 300k+ followers posting AI content too, so I really don’t think the issue was the content itself.
After thinking about it for hours, I was sure the penalty came from a private inbox conversation with a friend. We were joking around using words that sound offensive out of context, but in my country they’re commonly used between friends in a non-serious way. No threats, no racism, no extremist content, nothing like that.
I appealed the restriction and Facebook later responded saying their technology had made an error. But even after admitting it was a mistake, my page is STILL stuck without recommendations.
So I guess this is just a warning to other page owners: be careful with private messages on Facebook and Instagram, because automated AI moderation clearly does not understand context.