Last weekend, Meta told Ars that it reversed an advertising ban on a newly released Holocaust film called Beautiful Blue Eyes, saying that the ban—for allegedly violating Meta's race policy—was implemented in error.

The filmmaker whose movie was being blocked, Joshua Newton, told Ars that he’s still experiencing issues promoting the movie on Meta platforms, where accounts still seem to be restricted. Most frustrating to Alexander Newton, Joshua’s son and an actor featured in the film, is the fact that he still can’t promote his version of the movie’s title track on his Instagram.

“My Instagram page just has an endless spinning wheel when I click to promote, so they've damaged my account somehow,” Alexander alleged. "I have to completely restart the app on my phone to even get out of the app."

Alexander said the film's head of marketing has noted that, since the ban was reversed, the reach still seems unusually limited even though the movie’s Facebook page is now allowed to promote posts.

The promotion team for the film already felt it was a huge setback not having access to Facebook promotional tools before Beautiful Blue Eyes opened in 431 theaters on September 9. But now, as promotion continues for the theatrical release and new promotional items connected to the film become priorities to market the movie, the father and son told Ars that they want Meta to review their accounts and apologize for the supposed “error” made in banning the film’s ads.

Joshua said it was “obvious” that Meta did not make an error, because Meta staff upheld the ban during the initial review process. “One or more human beings at Facebook decided to uphold the ban,” Joshua said. “And not only uphold the ban, but actually send us a message to say our decision is final. Which is crazy.”

Both said that Facebook should reconsider how it handles advertiser appeals, because if Facebook staff had simply Googled the movie, “they would have known that it's genuine, they would have known it's a Holocaust movie,” Joshua said.

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“They should have humans that you can turn to if you've got an issue, especially if you are an advertiser that’s paying money,” Alexander said. “If we've got a big movie release, everything's gonna go wrong if we can't get our Facebook ads live, because they have such a monopoly" on reaching people online.

Meta told Ars it would review the new allegations and follow up with a statement. [Update: A Meta spokesperson told Ars that Meta stands by its original statement repeated here in the paragraph below this one. Based on Ars reporting, Meta reviewed both the Beautiful Blues Eyes official Facebook account and Alexander's Instagram account and confirmed that Meta has placed no restrictions on the user’s ability to advertise or promote either on Facebook or Instagram. Meta declined to comment further on any other reported problems or to respond to Newton's request for an apology.]

No clear path to fix

When Meta first told Ars the ban was lifted, a spokesperson said it was not due to the public outcry, but rather that: “We reviewed the ads and page in question and determined that the enforcement was made in error, so we lifted the restriction.”

Alexander told Ars that the reach on Beautiful Blue Eyes’ Facebook ads is so low that the promotion team’s marketing head suggested there might be something like a shadow ban causing ads to be removed from people’s feeds.

This week, Beautiful Blue Eyes is promoting a new way to watch the movie, especially for fans of Jaws star Roy Scheider, who note that it’s the late actor’s final movie. Using a new blockchain technology called MovieKey that Alexander created with help from MovieFarm and his company Drop Magnet, Beautiful Blue Eyes will be the first collectible movie released for the same price as Blu-Ray discs ($25) that audiences can store in Digital Wallets, rather than purchasing via Video-On-Demand services. After dedicating resources to developing that tech, the movie's promotional team hopes to effectively communicate unique benefits of this technology to audiences. They're worried that the seemingly limited reach of the official movie page on Facebook will prevent that.

Because the filmmakers expect to continue marketing Beautiful Blue Eyes to theatergoers and use the film to also market this new technology, it’s imperative to them that Meta “does its due diligence” and addresses alleged problems with the functionality of their promotional pages on Facebook and Instagram.

Joshua said he’s still seeking a resolution path, because at Meta, even when there's unusual circumstances like in this case, he said so far he's found that “there's no such structure, none.”