Negative feedback is what Meta calls the set of actions a user can take to push an ad away: "Hide ad," "Report ad," "Hide all ads from this advertiser," and similar responses. Unlike a scroll-past, these are explicit statements that the ad made someone's feed worse — and Meta's delivery system treats them accordingly. Ads that accumulate negative feedback are judged lower-quality experiences, which flows into the ad's quality ranking and makes the auction less friendly to it.
For a performance marketer, the important property of negative feedback is that it is a reaction to the whole ad experience — and on Facebook and Instagram, the comment thread is part of that experience. A viewer who opens the comments and finds scam links, impersonation accounts, or an unanswered wall of complaints has just been handed a reason to hit "Hide ad." The creative might be excellent; the thread got the ad reported anyway. This is one of the most direct mechanical links between comment spam and paid performance.
Frequency multiplies the risk. An audience that has seen the same ad many times is already primed to hide it — see ad frequency — and a degraded comment section lowers the threshold further. The combination of tired creative and a toxic thread is how ads slide into the auction's penalty box.
You cannot moderate someone's decision to hide your ad, but you can remove the provocations you control. Keeping threads clean — hiding scams and abuse promptly, answering real complaints in public — removes the ugliest trigger for negative feedback and protects the delivery efficiency you are paying for. The manual version of that workflow is documented in how to hide comments on Facebook ads; automating it across every active ad is the job ad-comment moderation tools like ROAS Shield were built for.