Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (in background) boards an elevator in Washington, D.C. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Creators upset about a shortfall in Meta’s promised ad-sharing payments say they’re being summarily booted from a private Meta-run Facebook group for influencers after speaking out.
Two creators who spoke to Fortune said they were removed from the invite-only Meta Creators Community group, run by the company’s Scaled Partnerships team, with no warning and little explanation, shortly after complaining about the payments issue.
As Fortune previously reported, Meta dramatically reduced payments by thousands of dollars to numerous creators who participated in an ad revenue sharing program for Reels videos using specially designated music. Some creators who shared screenshots had expected to make over $120,000 for the month—only to get paid less than $1,000. These creators received no formal notice about the payment changes, and the company blamed a “display error” for the larger payouts that were initially promised to the creators.
Among the people banned from the Facebook group is Azure MacCannell, the creator behind viral cleaning-hack account Live Composed, who was quoted in Fortune’searlier story about the payout cuts.
The last thing MacCannell did in the Facebook group was respond to a creator complaining about the earnings drop. On Aug. 1 she wrote, “I for sure wouldn’t have used the music since doing it resulted in an instant drop in reach. I kept pushing it BECAUSE the payout was good. Bait and switch with the best of them!” After writing that comment, MacCannell was removed with no warning or explanation, as when she went to browse posts in the group after waking up on Saturday morning.
She believes the combination of her complaints and her interview with Fortune inspired the company to boot her from the group. The private group, which was launched by Meta in September 2022, is a Meta staff-moderated space for creators to “share product feedback,” “receive first access to product updates & learnings,” and “share and problem solve with other creators.”
Rosie Okumura, a creator with over 115,000 Instagram followers known for her prank calls to scammers, was first silenced in the group after posting that her July earnings dropped from around $65,000 to $300, she says. Then, when her posting access was restored on Aug. 5, she posted about organizing a class action lawsuit for others in her situation, and was booted from the group altogether. “They were deleting posts, deleting comments, deleting responses, deleting questions, deleting my comments,” says the creator, who previously had never been censored within the Meta Creators Community group. “Their reason was that I broke the rule of ‘being kind.’”
A Meta spokesperson told Fortune that creators agree to rules around kindness and privacy, among others, upon joining the Facebook group, and violations can lead to bans. This spokesperson said that talking to the press does not lead to bans.
Scanning the group and responding to relevant threads in the Meta Creators Community Facebook group has been part of MacCannell’s morning routine. She did so at dawn, over coffee, before her family awakened since she was accepted into the group in September 2022, shortly after Meta launched it. As she operates her account alone from a rural location, the group stood as her informal workplace knowledge hub, populated by the closest substitutes she has for colleagues.
“I thought the purpose of the group was to be able to share struggles and how we felt about Meta, as a whole, to make it a better place. I didn’t realize we couldn’t say anything,” MacCannell, previously labeled a “Top Contributor” in the group, tells Fortune. “I definitely enjoyed contributing to the creator community. For me, [being banned] leaves a bit of a void.”
MacCannell reports that much content in the Facebook group containing negative information about the July Reels payouts had been deleted or comment-disabled prior to her removal from the group. “Everything looked like rainbows and sunshine in the group because they were filtering what was coming out,” she says. “But it wasn’t how we were feeling. It wasn’t the frustration that we were feeling. You would see what we were all experiencing.”
The Meta spokesperson told Fortune that disabling comments on posts that discuss diminished earnings is just policy, and that she could not elaborate further, declining to describe any specific policy.
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