Our Facebook page is currently suspended for reasons the company refuses to disclose, with their support agent indicating it would cost his job if he told us why. Within a 2 month period, IowaPodcast.com has been suspended, restricted, and locked out eight times. In that time, we’ve had over 800,000 views, 240 posts, added 3000 followers, and have interviewed 18 candidates running for Statewide or Federal office. Suspending our account less than one week before the Nov 3rd election is concerning.

The mystery suspensions began when we started posting political candidate interviews that went viral. After being re-instated several times, and told we were suspended in error, the process simply starts over.

As of 3 weeks ago, our account and identity was verified. We had a direct support line via Meta One Support, a service we pay for. And today with no warning we were yet again suspended with no appeal process given.

To date, we’ve been bounced through Meta’s “premium” support and we still don’t know what rule we broke.

We wish we could tell you why it happened. But we can’t, because Facebook refused to tell us. Yes, refused. An agent we got temporary access to said he couldn’t tell us what rule we broke “due to internal policy.”

We’re journalists. Our job is asking people in power to explain their decisions, but Meta is the exception. We have followed their Terms of Service, we paid for premium support, we have emailed department heads, and we have even worked through personal connections that know company executives who were told they “didn’t want to be involved.”

Meta’s status screen showed no restrictions even while the page was suspended. The last suspensions recorded were on Aug 22 and Aug 25 — both of which were errors and reversed.

Iowa has been a friend to Meta, giving them approximately $26 million in state High Quality Jobs Program tax credits and sales/use tax refunds (2013 and 2017), plus 20-year 100% property tax abatements from the City of Altoona on its data center campus valued at about $40 million over 20 years for one major phase, along with related TIF district placement and franchise-fee local-match arrangements. It’s upsetting they would target the very community that rolled out the red carpet.

What follows is what happened, in order, as best we can document it, and why we think it matters to anyone who cares about small, independent media in Iowa.

Facebook Suspension of IowaPodcast.com and The Iowa Podcast started when our reels took off.

In late August, we posted a few reels that went viral. It was the kind of content we make every week at The Iowa Podcast: political interviews with the people running for, and holding, office in this state and in Washington. That clip reached far more people than usual.

And then the suspensions began. First our Page on Aug 22, then Justin Brady’s personal page a day later. (Facebook requires you to have a personal profile to run pages.)

We appealed immediately and on review, Facebook put it back. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it was the beginning.

Despite the “error,” the personal profile of our host, Justin Brady, who is an admin of our Page, started showing as “Restricted.” When we asked Meta which Community Standard had been violated, they would not say. We’ll come back to that, because it became the theme of everything that followed.

Facebook / Meta People We’ve Reached Out To

We’ve reached out to numerous individuals at Meta and Facebook, requesting human review. To date, we have not received a response.

Those people are as follows.

• Elizabeth Gautier, whom we’ve been treating as a press contact. We emailed her Aug 22 and 23 and copied her on Aug 25.
• Kendi Ntwiga, who’s in integrity operations. We emailed her Sep 20, Sep 24 and Oct 1.
• Nick Grudin, who’s in partnerships. We emailed him Sep 20, Sep 24 and Oct 1.
• Matt Sexton, who is in community engagement, Altoona. We were introduced by a lawmaker on Oct 30th.

We also emailed general inboxes and have received no response.

• escalations@cases.meta.com 17 emails between Sep 14 & Oct 8.
• press@meta.com on Aug 25.

The security loop that couldn’t be closed

In September, things got stranger. Meta told Justin his account needed to turn on Advanced Protection by a deadline of September 28. Fine. Security is good. The problem was that the two-factor authentication codes Meta was supposed to text to his phone never arrived.

Interesting side note, you’ll see in the screen capture Justin’s account was “Last Active Dec 42, 1969” long before Facebook was event invented on February 4th of 2004.

In effect, we were told to secure the account by a deadline using a process that wasn’t working. Meanwhile, our access to Meta Business Suite was restricted. That’s the tool we use to schedule and manage posts for the show. Between September 13 and 15, Iowa Podcast posts failed to publish. Scheduling had been de-activated.

Facebook isn’t a hobby for us, it’s one of the places Iowans find our interviews. Truthfully, we’d rather not use the platform facing this kind of hostile treatment, but Iowans love our content and this show is for you.

We paid for “Meta One” premium support and the rep refused to tell us what rule we broke.

Meta sells a subscription called Meta Verified, and with it comes access to Meta’s premium support team. On the evening of September 17, Justin spent well over an hour in a chat with Meta’s “Pro Team” under the topic “Disabled or restricted asset.” The first agent looked into it briefly, said the issue was outside their scope, and transferred him to a second agent in the same chat. That’s when things got weird.

Justin’s personal profile had one current “feature limit” restriction. The post Facebook had restored was no longer under restriction, but his account still had what the agent called a “current feature limit violation.”

Then came the number. The agent said the Iowa Podcast’s Page had 13 counts of violations. We asked for the list. Which 13 posts? Which policies? Were they all on one post, or spread across many? The agent said the violations were “definitely” related to posts or content, but would not identify a single one.

At one point we were told support didn’t have access to that information. At another, we were told it was company policy not to disclose what rule we broke. And finally the agent seems to indicate he would lose his job if he disclosed the reasons. “Because we are not allowed to share this information for security, privacy, and company policy. It will cause my job and your account.”

What we were offered instead was a generic list of reasons pages get flagged: automated flags, shared or “unoriginal” content, and Community Standards violations involving safety, spam, or copyright. When we asked whether those were the reasons for our Page’s violations, the agent said, “That’s correct.” When we asked whether these violations were why the Page had previously been suspended, the answer was that they “can be.”

It should be obvious, but our content is original. We record our interviews in our own studio with physically present candidates. We don’t use clips from other shows and we own the rights to our intro music and to our own work. And here’s the detail we keep coming back to: the exact same content goes to Instagram, which Meta also owns. Instagram has never flagged it, restricted it, or suspended it. Instagram even let us subscribe to Meta Verified right away. On Facebook, we were told in September that our Page wasn’t eligible yet, under criteria the agent said differ between the two platforms and aren’t all public. (That changed later, as you’ll see.)

We were also told support cannot remove a restriction manually. It lifts automatically, eventually, if the system sees consistent compliance. When we asked how we’re supposed to follow rules we don’t know we broke, we were pointed to the public Community Standards page and to the Professional Dashboard, and told another agent would say the same thing.

Writing to escalations, and the silence that followed

Starting September 14, formal complaints went to Meta’s escalations team by email. Those emails laid out the timeline and asked for something simple: a human review, and a written list of what we supposedly did wrong.

Between September 14 and October 8, seventeen emails went to that address across two threads, including follow-ups with screenshots of failed posts. As of this writing, none of them has received a reply.

We want to be fair here. Meta is enormous, and no company can hand-hold billions of users. But we weren’t asking for hand-holding. We were Meta Verified subscribers asking which of our posts broke which rule. That’s the minimum anyone needs in order to comply with anything.

Verified, then canceled

About three weeks ago, the Page did get verified as automatic restrictions dropped off. Two notifications from Meta on the Iowa Podcast’s Page say the same thing: “We confirmed your identity. Check out your Page to see the verified badge.”

So by early October, Meta had confirmed who we are and put a verified badge on the Page it had told us in September wasn’t eligible for “Inauthentic Behavior.”

Then, in the past day, four more notifications appeared on the Page, all with the same wording: “There was a problem so we are canceling your Meta One Advanced subscription.” That is the entire explanation. There was a problem. It doesn’t say what the problem was.

To date, we’ve supplied Meta with our IRS paperwork and EIN number, our founder’s cellphone, home and work addresses, credit card payment for verification, added a verification link to this site, and even numerous selfies of Justin for verification.

This week: suspended, restored, and suspended again.

On Thursday, October 29, Facebook emailed Justin to say his personal account had been suspended because the account, or activity on it, didn’t follow its Community Standards on inauthentic behavior. He had 180 days to take action.

He requested a review. About an hour and a half later, a second email arrived: “Your review was successful.” Facebook said it had reviewed the account and saw that activity on it does follow its Community Standards, and he was back on Facebook.

We’ll let that sit on its own. In less than two hours, the same account, run by Justin under his own name, was found to violate the rules and then found to follow them.

Then, this morning, the Iowa Podcast’s Facebook Page was locked out and suspended. That’s the sequence: identity confirmed and badge granted, subscription canceled because “there was a problem,” and then the Page itself suspended. As of this writing, we don’t have an explanation for the cancellation, cannot post to the page, and have been given no method to appeal or reach support.

Why this matters beyond us

Small, independent outlets like ours depend on a handful of platforms to reach people. What we’ve learned is that there are secret rules Meta uses to determine what content stays up, and what content comes down and reps are told to not disclose those rules.

Section 230 currently protects platforms like Facebook from lawsuits over content because they’re just a platform and don’t curate that content. But clearly they do curate content based on a set of unpublished rules.

The support process, even the premium version, told us it couldn’t name what we did, couldn’t lift the restriction itself, and had nothing further to offer.

That’s not a content moderation debate. Reasonable people can argue about where the lines should be. This is about simple transparency: if you’re going to penalize someone, tell them the reason. Thirteen violations, and not one of them identified. A restriction that support says only “the system” can lift. A security requirement that depended on text messages that never came. And restrictions that land on exactly the kind of work we think matters most: original, local, civic journalism, the interviews with candidates and officeholders that help Iowans decide how to vote.

What we’re doing next, and where to find us

We’ll keep pursuing this through Meta’s own channels, and we’ll update this post if we learn anything, especially if someone at Meta can finally tell us which posts and which rules were involved. We’re happy to be corrected. That offer has been open since August.

In the meantime, The Iowa Podcast and The Iowa Business Podcast aren’t going anywhere. The best place to find us is by subscribing to IowaPodcast.com, a site we own and control. You can also find us on YouTube and X.

If you run a small Iowa outlet and you’ve been through something similar, we’d like to hear from you. We’re journalists. Collecting stories like this is what we do.