Meta ad rejections
Facebook ad rejected for personal attributes
Meta does not let an ad imply it knows something private about the person reading it. The rule covers age, health, financial state, race, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. It is not about whether the claim is true or kind. Asserting or implying the attribute at all is what breaks the policy.
What Meta’s notice says
What triggers it
- 01Second-person questions about a condition or situation: "Are you struggling with debt?"
- 02Any sentence starting "If you're overweight", "If you're broke", "If you're lonely"
- 03"Your" attached to a condition: your weight, your disorder, your disability, your credit score
- 04Phrases that claim insight into the reader: "We know you're tired of..."
- 05Naming a diagnosis directly: "Do you have diabetes?", "Do you have anxiety?"
Before and after
Are you struggling with debt? We can help.
Many people carry more debt than they planned to. Here is one way through it.
Move from second person to third. The reader still recognises themselves without the ad claiming to know them.
If you're overweight, this program works.
A weight-management program built with dietitians.
Describe the product, not the person.
Fix your anxiety in 6 weeks.
A six-week program for people working on anxiety.
"Your anxiety" asserts the condition. "People working on" does not.
How to fix it
- –Replace every "you" and "your" that touches a condition with a third-person construction.
- –Lead with what the product is rather than who the reader is.
- –Cut rhetorical questions about the reader's situation entirely. They are the single most common trigger.
- –Keep the benefit. You are changing who the sentence is about, not weakening the offer.
Caught before launch
Preflight matches this category against Meta's Policy 4.1 patterns and flags it as a blocking error before you spend anything.
Scan your ad copy free →Questions
Can I appeal a personal attributes rejection?
You can, but appeals on this policy rarely succeed when the copy genuinely uses second person about a condition. Rewriting and resubmitting is faster than appealing.
Does this apply to the image as well as the text?
Yes. Before-and-after body images and images that single out a condition can trigger the same policy even when the copy is clean.
Why did this ad run for weeks before being rejected?
Meta re-reviews ads continuously and its classifiers change. An ad passing initial review is not a permanent approval.
Other rejection reasons
Misleading claims
misleading
Prohibited content
prohibited content
Restricted category
special ad category
Low quality or clickbait
low quality
Engagement bait
engagement bait
Landing page problem
landing page
Circumventing systems
circumventing systems
Brand usage
Facebook brand
Image text
image text
No clear reason
ad policy violation