Jerry Banfield. Phantom demonetization

In February 2020, gamer Jerry Banfield, who at the time had just over two million followers on Facebook, logged into the Creators Studio, the section designed by the platform for creators to manage and evaluate the statistics of their content, and discovered that his account had lost the possibility of monetization for not complying with the policies for partners.

The discovery was almost an accident. He had not received any notification from Facebook or a message explaining the reasons for the decision. Nor did he have any reason to suspect that his latest posts were in breach of any of the platform's rules, as it was the same kind of content he had posted without issue in recent years.

When he appealed, he had no chance to argue or explain his situation, he was only asked to put the link to his page. Two days later, he was informed that his page did not meet the requirements to monetize and that he had to adjust it to the community rules to recover this possibility. According to the message, displayed by Banfield in a YouTube video, he would have to wait 90 days to be able to appeal again.

That same day he logged back into his account and found that the sanctions had disappeared from the Creators Studio. There was no trace of the demonetization or the appeal rejection, and as if it had all been a big misunderstanding or mistake from the start, the "Recent Violations" section was blank.