Facebook has banned a hard-hitting ad campaign by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, arguing that users of the social networking site should only see “neutral or positive” messages.

The RNIB launched the ad on its YouTube channel and has been seeking to run a campaign featuring the video across Facebook.

The campaign, which aims to promote the need for sight loss advisers in every UK hospital, uses the common charity advertising tactic of making viewers think about how they would feel if their health was under threat.

In the ad, a women is seen becoming teary eyed as a voiceover explains that she has just been told she will lose her sight.

“You’ll fear for your job, your home, your life,” runs the voiceover. “You’ll see everyone losing their sight needs the right support.”

Facebook’s advertising team has refused to clear the video ad for use in a campaign across its network, saying it breaks its guidelines on language that is “profane, vulgar, threatening or generates high negative feedback”.

Asking for clarification, the RNIB’s social media team received a further email response saying Facebook is not very keen on hard-hitting ads.

“We’ve found that people dislike ads that directly address them or their personal characteristics,” said a member of the Facebook Ads Team. “Ads should not single out individuals or degrade people. We don’t accept language like ‘fear of losing your sight, losing your job?’ and the like. Instead, text must present realistic and accurate information in a neutral or positive way and should not have any direct attribution to people.”

The ad has been seen more than 50,000 times on YouTube while the RNIB has been endeavouring to get it cleared to run on Facebook. The RNIB said they have not received any complaints about the content of the video.

“We were really shocked to find out that Facebook had banned our advert but even more surprised when they couldn’t tell us exactly why, we’re still not sure what we’ve really done wrong here,” said Natasha Dickinson, group head of marketing and communications at the RNIB.

“Facebook is a really effective way for RNIB to raise awareness of sight loss and reach thousands of people who might not otherwise know about our work and how we help blind and partially sighted people. Facebook is the world’s biggest social media site and it would be great to see them working with, and not against, charities.”