How Flat Earthers Nearly Derailed a Space Photo Book

[brooklynite]

New York Times

Nine years into his project photographing space artifacts for a self-published book and exhibit, Mr. Redgrove realized that he needed cash. The project involves photographing the artifacts and objects associated with space travel — the suits, the gloves, the helmets and the rubber stamps for imprinting astronauts’ names on their spacesuits.

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But after he had taken most of the pictures, he learned that there were more costs than he had expected. So he created a Kickstarter campaign. He had 30 days to raise $189,277. (The way Kickstarter works is that if you meet your goal through donations, you get your money. If you don’t, you get nothing.) To promote the effort, he bought a series of ads on Facebook and Instagram in the $200 to $400 range.

Mr. Redgrove had worked in advertising, photographing cars. But he had never placed an ad before. He learned that he could tell Facebook whom he did — and did not — want to reach. “We specified we didn’t want conspiracy theorists and lunar landing deniers and flat earthers,” he said.

About 24 hours after the ads were approved, he got a notification telling him the ad had been removed. He resubmitted it. It was accepted — and then removed again — 15 or 20 times, he said. The explanation given: He had run “misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback.”

He understood that it was Facebook’s algorithm that rejected the ads, not a person. Getting additional answers proved difficult, a common complaint with advertising on Facebook. The best clues he could find came in the comments under the ads, which he and his colleagues captured in screenshots before they were removed and in responses to other posts about the project: There were phrases such as “The original moon landing was faking” and “It’s all a show,” along with memes mocking space technology. Some comments were hard to gauge, with users insisting that the earth was flat but that they’d buy the book anyway.