Facebook may not like conservatives but the social media giant sure seems to help them

"That was fun," Bethany S. Mandel says, after a conservative publisher of children's books was banned from advertising on Meta's Facebook platform just days before Christmas, and then mysteriously reinstated this week after a national furor.

Mandel is editor of Heroes of Liberty, which publishes books about conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. We spoke by phone about the ban and the reinstatement as her five children played in the background.

Ban drew attention to new publisher

Within hours of a Fox Business report about the ban of Heroes of Liberty, a Meta spokesperson was on the phone to members of Congress and to Fox Business to announce that the decision had been reversed.

Facebook's ban might actually have helped the still-new publisher. The startup company received a ton of attention this week in conservative media, and Mandel gained a thousand new followers on Twitter.

The publicity also led to the sale of an as-yet-unknown number of biographies about people such as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and economist Thomas Sowell.

Facebook apologized for ban

Minutes before I spoke to Mandel, she received an apology from Meta. "I wanted to reach out personally to offer our apologies that the ad account linked to Heroes of Liberty was mistakenly disabled," wrote Liza-Bart Dolan of Meta.

Originally, an unsigned message from Facebook said the account had been locked because of "low-quality" advertising and "disruptive" content.

"We never thought we'd run afoul of this social media censorship we've been reading about," says Mandel, who like other conservatives saw the ban as a case of political targeting. "Anything that is not along strict woke party lines is vulnerable."

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I asked Facebook for a comment about why Heroes of Liberty had been banned, but the company sent back a statement simply repeating that the account had been reinstated.

Whatever happened in the background at Facebook, the bumbling social media giant has a tendency to help conservatives more than it hurts, even if inadvertently.

A New York University report last year found that major social media platforms such as Facebook actually help conservatives reach larger audiences. And, in August, according to social-analytics company Newswhip, three of the top five publishers on Facebook were conservative – Daily Wire, Daily Mail and Fox News. Newswhip has found similar results for other months.

It is hard to argue that Meta/Facebook is not a liberal company. Of $8 million in political donations connected to the company in 2020, 88.5% went to Democrats. As a result, conservatives will be suspicious, regardless of the intent behind Facebook's content moderation decisions.

Mandel, for her part, is sure that conservatives aren't treated fairly on the platform, despite the happy ending for Heroes of Liberty: "These mistakes only seem to ever go in one direction."

David Mastio is an opinion writer for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter @DavidMastio

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Facebook ban helped this conservative publisher grow its market