> There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.
I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.
I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.
Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.
I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.
I battled an online casino that did this. I had under a grand in balance but my account got locked and they needed verification for every payment method I had ever used over a 2 year period, and I had used A LOT. I would reply back immediately with all the information, etc. Took a good month and a trip to my bank to get documentation on ownership of old debit cards but by the end of it I was sending them basically a 20 page package of all the proof they needed with everything already laid out perfect. I had accumulated a bunch of internal support email addresses of various agents or systems and would CC everyone every time, by the end the email chain was 200+ messages and I had 15 people on CC. But I got it unlocked.
> That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.
You've been brainwashed. How can you seriously make this statement?
Meta has $200 _billion_ revenue.
Amazon employs _1.56 million_ people worldwide.
Meta could absolutely hire a million support workers and handle the appeals. They don't, but they could. Smaller social networks would be ideal, but not the only option. You can legislate a requirement of human support availability for gatekeeper platforms.
A quick way to discredit your own point is to confuse revenue with profit. Never mention revenue when you are trying to claim companies can afford to do X or Y.
Grocery stores famously have large revenues but very narrow profit margins so they can’t afford anything expensive.
Meta’s profit was $60 billion in 2025. That’s the number to use in examples like yours.
I wholeheartedly agree companies are doing so bad on customer support nowadays, but I'd argue that there will slways be more fake users than any size of human customer support can take, especially in the age of AI.
This all goes away if you require social media companies to charge users for access. The addiction to free stuff is what’s really killing the internet.
You think feds won't pay for bot accounts? Record labels already pay for botted streams, so I'm pretty sure MOSSAD would pay to bot Facebook. Hell, it already happens on X.
The problem mentioned in the parent comment was the volume of fake accounts overloading customer support. If it’s no longer free to create spam accounts for phishing etc, the profitability of scamming will shrink and decrease the incentives. I don’t think feds are exactly slamming the support queue.
More importantly than the bot problem, it would decrease social media usage in the aggregate while also encouraging more competition. Much easier to bootstrap a business if you’re not having to compete with big tech offering the same thing for free because they can subsidize the losses.
You should read reports of how Amazon drivers and warehouse workers are treated.
In any case, hiring more support staff doesn't change the quantity of that stuff.
> You suggest they should scale up the support team, I said they should just scale down their whole business.
Oh no, I always agreed with you that what you're saying should be what happens. But there's zero chance of that happening, as only the US can really do this, and it won't unless the candidates for 2028 are not the current frontrunners.
Requiring human phone support however is something e.g. the EU could very reasonably do and get away with.
> You should read report from those support workers. How many disgusting image they need to see each day.
Nonsense. You're talking about image moderation when somebody else is talking about appealing when their account is shut down after an accusation of being automated. There is 1) no one being (overly) traumatized by basic customer service, and 2) no reduced responsibility for removing child pornography from your platform if your customer service is terrible.
Companies as large as Facebook (really all of the American Big Tech) should just be illegal.
It's long overdue that we remembered that the very notion of a corporation is a creation of society. Corporations have no natural rights whatsoever because they don't naturally exist. It follows, then, that societies have the right to impose any limits and prohibitions when chartering corporations that don't discriminate against their owners (i.e. so long as restrictions apply uniformly). This includes limit on company size, its marketshare etc.
They already are illegal, laws are just not enforced. We don't need more laws, we need enforcement. It's the same in the EU. If GDPR laws were probably enforced the yearly fines would be a magnitude higher than they currently are. But they're still too scared because of the defense and gas reliance.
It stems me positive to read this by a user with a 2012 HN account though! Nice.
In US at least, the current interpretation of our anti-trust laws (after Bork's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox) is such that it is not illegal - you have to prove harm to users, mere market dominance isn't sufficient.
Substack also wont let you contact human support without spending days fkdskf around with its ai chatbots who refuse to ever, ever escalate to a person
Some part of me deep inside that remembers Paypal in the early 2000s and their Kafka labryrinth systems thinks about Peter Thiel and how he's responsible for both Facebook and Paypal. Maybe coincidence, maybe not
Companies created these traps not to screw customers but to thwart fraudsters. There are SO many worldwide - see annual fraud loss stats.
Paypal and many other companies that trade in valuables have to put up protections because there are almost no reprecussions for perpetrators in certain foreign countries.
You're thinking of the fraud detection tools. I'm talking about a tool that was designed to NEVER let the user succeed. There is no way to successfully verify your ID and get your account reopened. They build it because their fraud tools were hyper aggressive and it was cheaper to lose the customers and block the fraud.
I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.
I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.
Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.
I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.
Companies still do this today.