Guadalupe Ramirez and husband Ben Blevins, shown in her fair-trade craft store, AlterNatives Boutique, in Richmond’s Carytown district in January 2021. She started the store nearly three decades ago.
Facebook recently announced its quarterly financial earnings, reporting $9.19 billion profit on $29.01 billion in revenue. On a call to announce its performance, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg referred 10 times to the importance of Facebook’s services “to grow your small business.”
Facebook wants lawmakers and the public to think its services are vital to Main Streets across America, and it spends tens of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts to paint that picture. But the truth is, Big Tech companies like Facebook exploit and mistreat small businesses. As a store owner in Richmond, my business experiences this firsthand.
I started a fair-trade craft store 27 years ago, and we have helped hundreds of ethical artisans across the world sell their crafts, jewelry and clothing to conscious consumers locally and online. We take pride in sourcing goods from underserved and overlooked communities, and communicating our mission to the Richmond community is at the core of our marketing.
But the pandemic put a squeeze on our shop, and like millions of small businesses nationwide, we turned to digital advertising to promote our artisans’ goods and try to stay afloat. I hoped advertising on Facebook would allow us to tell our story and reach new customers that shared our business’s values. Increasing our e-commerce sales was the only way the business was going to survive, and Facebook promised the biggest bang for our buck.
I soon would learn that promise was an illusion. Small advertisers are left to the whims of Facebook’s flawed automated systems, and we don’t qualify for human-level customer assistance to help solve problems we have on the platform.
When I would try to run ads promoting our business and our mission-driven work, Facebook’s automated system often would block them. Ads about the goods and wares of Indigenous communities or those already living with the consequences of climate change all were blocked by an algorithm. There was no feedback or recourse.
Facebook provided no specifics regarding the part of the ad that violated its advertising policies. And there was no one to talk to at Facebook to help sort it out.
To my business, Facebook appeared to be faceless. It was another challenge during a pandemic filled with them.
Late last year, I started to see news reports about small-business owners who were running into similar problems. In some cases, their ads weren’t just being denied — Facebook’s dysfunctional automated system suspended them from accessing their accounts for no discernable reason.
The owner of a small honey business was locked out of her business account without any explanation from Facebook. She resorted to reaching out personally to Facebook employees on Twitter. Her account eventually was restored, but she also didn’t receive any guidance from Facebook about how best to avoid having this problem in the future.
“They didn’t give me any feedback,” she told Fortune. “They just reset the whole thing as if it never happened.”
For a company that wants the world to believe it is a godsend, Facebook has a startling lack of self-awareness of the livelihoods it puts at risk. Instead of spending millions of dollars on advertising campaigns saying “small businesses deserve to be heard,” Facebook should start listening to the small businesses raising legitimate issues about their platform.
The company’s ability to shrug off this hypocrisy while still making billions in profit each quarter is an ominous sign. It’s clear that Facebook increasingly acts like a monopoly; it doesn’t have to provide its small advertisers with adequate customer service because we don’t have many, if any, other options.
This is a serious threat to our local economies and communities, and it’s why I joined the Main Street Against Big Tech campaign. The small-business owners involved in this campaign are speaking up to tell the truth about how Facebook and Big Tech companies exploit small advertisers. Together, we can set the record straight and warn other business owners about our experiences.
But the real change needs to happen in Washington. Lawmakers and regulators must show that they can stand up to a deep-pocketed lobbying effort built on lies. They should do everything they can to rein in Facebook and Big Tech — and to level the playing field for small-business owners and the tens of millions of workers they employ across the country.
Guadalupe Ramirez is the owner of AlterNatives Boutique in Richmond and a member of the Main Street Alliance. Contact her at: info@alternatives.boutique
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Guadalupe Ramirez and husband Ben Blevins, shown in her fair-trade craft store, AlterNatives Boutique, in Richmond’s Carytown district in January 2021. She started the store nearly three decades ago.
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