There's an update to this, at the bottom of the post.

I'm a huge fan of Signal.org, the foundation that operates Signal messenger - the very best, and fully private, competitor to Whatsapp*. If you're not using it, you should be.

It was a joy to wake up this morning and see that they had delivered a ridiculously simple, brilliant, marketing campaign called "Ads about Ads" - using Facebook and Instagram.

Using the vast data resources of Facebook, they created an advertising campaign which target specific groups of people. So far so good - that's exactly what Facebook wants their customers to do.

What they apparently didn't appreciate, however, is the text of the advert clearly explained who and how the reader had been targeted. Needless to say - it didn't take long for Facebook to shut the account down.

I wonder which terms and conditional Signal.org broke? Was it just being a very vocal competitor to Facebook? Was it the way the ads were written? Was it just some random other thing? For me, it doesn't really matter. Signal now calls these the Instagram ads you will never see. Indeed.

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*Worth noting: Currently, where Whatsapp uses end to end encryption, it was developed by Signal. That's one of the brilliantly weird things about open source software.

Update: In this Twitter thread, Facebook claims this is a false story (oh the irony), a PR stunt. Signal argues back. And here's the thing, if Signal faked it, that's obviously not cool, but that pretty much everyone will believe that Facebook is capable of this - is telling enough. No matter what Facebook says or does, they're coming off bad - because, they are that bad.