How Facebook And Big Tech Wage Publicity Wars Through Close Ties With Small Businesses
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When Facebook wanted to turn up the heat on Apple earlier this year in a dispute about ads and data privacy, Facebook brought some ringers to the fight. In a prominent online ad campaign, it featured several small businesses discussing how Apple’s decision to allow users to turn off data collection would not only eat away at Facebook’s trillion-dollar market cap, it would hurt the little guys, too, limiting the effectiveness of Facebook’s targeted ads.
The marketing tugged at the heartstrings, highlighting the imperilment of what seemed like ordinary mom-and-pop-type companies. But at least two of the featured small businesses, Morgan Miller Plumbing in Grandview, Missouri and Enlightened Marketing in Windsor, Colorado, actually have deep connections to Facebook, part of a familiar Big Tech strategy to use relationships with small businesses and pro-small business lobbyist groups in public-policy PR campaigns, according to new research from the non-partisan Tech Transparency Project.
“They’re portraying these as sort of an upswelling of grassroots, small business support for Big Tech rather than what they really are, which is this very highly cultivated group of mouthpieces,” says Katie Paul, the Tech Transparency Project’s director.
In the recent example of Facebook’s campaign, Morgan Miller’s founder, Jeff Morgan, says in his official bio on his company website that he has had the “privilege of visiting Facebook headquarters to share ideas.” Meanwhile, Enlightened Marketing founder Jeremy Howie belongs to Facebook’s Small Business Council, an advisory group set up by the social network to help it better understand its small business customers. Moreover, Howie on his company’s website says he’s also visited Facebook HQ several times, met with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and has “taken part in several internal Facebook beta tests.”
Moreover, the researchers point out, both Morgan Miller’s CEO, Stella Crewse, and Enlightened Marketing’s founder, Howie, sit on the board of the Connected Commerce Council. The pro-small business lobbying group, known as 3C, counts Amazon, Google and Square as official partners; Facebook was also one until recently, a 3C spokesman says. (“3C appreciates the investment of our partner companies in our education programs and general support of 3C member companies,” the lobbying group’s website reads.)
To be clear, there’s nothing illegal about creating ad campaigns that could strike some viewers as less than wholly authentic. “Facebook makes no apologies for working directly with some of the 200 million businesses on our platform to showcase how they are able to reach new customers and create jobs in their communities,” a Facebook spokesperson says. “We are public about our efforts, including creating opportunities for small businesses to give feedback and advice to us and to each other. We will continue to offer free services and affordable advertising that used to only be available to the biggest advertisers.”
But it is illustrative of the tightly coordinated inner-workings of Big Tech’s fights in these public policy battles. Back when the antitrust movement against Big Tech started up in 2019, 3C produced pro-Big Tech marketing aimed to sway Congress that featured Myles Hagan, the owner of Geoff’s Farmhouse Tables in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, and several other small businesses, according to an earlier Tech Transparency Project report. “Without companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, I would not have been able to find a customer base beyond the borders of my beloved Palmetto state,” Myles Hagan said in one press release. “Small businesses like mine tend to get hurt when Congress goes after the big guys.” And sometimes these small businesses even get recycled: While Morgan Miller appeared most recently in a Facebook campaign, it also appeared in a 2020 and 2021 Google marketing campaign heralding the benefit of its tools for small businesses.
3C was founded in 2018 by Jake Ward, a former public relations executive and, briefly, a press secretary for Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican. In the past, 3C has submitted comments from small businesses to the FTC that supported digital tools from Big Tech like digital payments and video conferecing; flown other small businesses into Washington to meet with regulators and legislative staff; and assembled press statements like this one, in which argued against the government’s new antitrust cases against Big Tech and included quotes from small businesses praising those large companies.
3C, which wouldn’t comment for this story, isn’t the only firm devoted to helping Big Tech defend itself in this manner. Another active lobbying group identified by the Tech Transparency Project is the Small Business Roundtable, a Washington, D.C.-based organization founded by two Democratic political operatives, Rhett Buttle and John Stanford. Last May, the Small Business Roundtable and Facebook partnered on a report, “State of Small Business.” The document cited findings drawn from a survey of 68,000 small businesses already active on Facebook. Given this background, their main conclusion isn’t too surprising, that Facebook’s online ad marketplace and other digital tools had been crucial in shoring up their failing companies. Nonetheless, Sandberg publicly promoted the report in a press release and through op-eds, and the company also used in paid advertising campaigns online.
“Big Tech has got this group of small businesses that they can tap, and they’re pre-vetted: They know they’re going to be on message,” says Paul, the Tech Transparency Project director. “It’s just very easy for them to keep going back to that well because these guys are part of the team.”
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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