Facebook have rejected an advert for indie game Road to 96 for being a “political ad,” as the ads encourage players to “reach the border.”
Axios reports developer Yoan Fanise had adverts for his choose your own adventure game. Road to 96 is set in the fictional authoritarian nation of Petria, with the player on a wild road-trip to reach the nation’s border.
Adverts for the game on Facebook had encouraged prospective players to “flee the regime” on a “risky road trip to the border.” Other adverts encouraged players to “escape from a country in turmoil” and “reach the border.”
An agency submitted Fanise’s adverts to Facebook on his behalf in June, only to be rejected. On June 28th, Facebook’s ad team told Fanise in an email “some of your ads don’t comply with our Advertising Policy for social issues, electoral or political ads.”
The email stated the adverts may have been rejected due to including real life political figures, mentioning elections, and images “statements or slogans about social issues, such as the economy, environmental policy, or civil and social rights.”
The 2020 US election featured discussions about immigration and the US-Mexico border, as it was in the 2016 US election. Recently, President Joe Biden has come under fire for his handling of illegal immigrants amid a 20-year high [1, 2, 3, 4].
Fanise was given two options to have his ads appear on Facebook. Either edit them to remove the offending content, or “get authorized to run political ads.” Fanise did not respond to the email. “First, I thought it was a joke,” Fanise told Axios. “I thought about ‘Minority Report. This is a robot checking in advance what you’re going to do and decide for you, no you’re not going to do that.”
Facebook’s own statement on its Ad Review Process notes that “Our enforcement isn’t perfect, and both machines and people make mistakes. When we launch a new policy, it can take time for the various parts of our enforcement system […] to learn how to correctly and consistently enforce the new standard.”
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Fanise stated (in GamesIndustry.biz’ words) that while the game skirting direct world and political commentary, he hoped players would walk away with empathy for those who find themselves in different and unfamiliar situations; and consider ideas they had not before.
“It’s hard to find a balance. Because I didn’t want to make any judgment. I didn’t want to say, ‘Okay, let’s take the United States and capitalism and say it’s bad, it’s crap, and it’s going to fail.’ Or, ‘Let’s take North Korea and communism and say, ‘Okay, this is bad.’ So basically, what we did is we mixed both of them. Let’s take the worst of both… We took the most extreme, and we try to match them. Even visually, the architecture is a bit like brutalist architecture, like communist, but put inside a state that looks more like Arizona.”
Road to 96 launches August 16th on Windows PC (via Steam), and Nintendo Switch.