Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose. Not that showing up means a win.

I'm surprised that someone had trouble serving a subpoena on Facebook. Looking up "Meta" in California Corporation Search brings up everything with "Metal" in it, which is a hassle. Their actual company name is "Meta Platforms, Incorporated". Search for "Meta Platforms" here.[1] California company registration #2711108.

Subpoenas are sent, using a process server, to their registered agent, which is Corporation Service Company in Sacramento, a business which exists to receive subpoenas for other companies. And, conveniently, there are process serving companies with offices in the same building, and you can find them by searching for the address of CSC and "process server", then ignoring the spam results.

Most small claims court web sites explain all this.

[1] https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business

The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. And soon, LLMs will be used to attempt to solve this problem again, and they will fail again.

It is easy to look at the historical information in a ticketing system and make the conclusion that the vast majority of the issues can be solved by pointing the user to frequently-encountered solutions. However, the issues that are easily solved are also typically the least impactful. It is the long-tail of this problem that is difficult to solve, and is infinite in length; there will always be exceptions that automation cannot handle.

Completely neglecting these issues should be prohibited for consumer commercial services.

> Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf — on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” a coalition of 41 state AGs wrote in a letter to the company earlier this year.

Hundreds of thousands of people contacting the AG offices... over a particular site/app... customer service issues?

I would've guessed 1/1000th of that.

Consumer rights have taken such a beating in the internet age. If you look at pre-internet product categories there are all kind of protections on the books like minimum warranty lengths, lemon laws, etc. Meanwhile, with software products - even very expensive ones - you're at the mercy of the vendor and their ToS. The fact that you can't even get refunds (e.g. within 15 days or something) for most software is ridiculous.

Instagram is full of scam ads. If you report them, they answer you telling that they aren't violating the terms so there's nothing they can do about it. Scammers be selling fake starlink equipment and plans left and right. They are clever about it, they clone the website and offer a realistic good deal (not too good that would make you doubt it).

It's ridiculous that this is necessary but I salute people for using the legal system instead of just feeling helpless.

There are dozens if not far more groups on facebook pretending to be meta support to phish accounts. Facebook knows about these groups and could shut them down trivially, but that does not boost engagement numbers. A lot of meta policies are actually very hostile towards users and make absolutely no sense.

For instance, I learned I was somehow shadowbanned or deranked on instagram and confirmed on several accounts with tests. I complained to a friend I knew that work there and all of a sudden my account was getting activity again. Ever since then though the algorithm has been flagging and moderating insanely weird posts for "spam" or "self promotion", which I figured out is just the algorithm flagging you for a post going viral. when I comment about anything vaguely related to the tech field, which are always on topic and full of information I will get flagged. It's irritating to watch your account get "penalized" in some completely opaque and unfair way when you can see actual rampant spam all over their platforms. And there is practically zero recourse unless you know someone internally, like I mentioned.

It's not even just their spam "moderation," their content moderation (which is automated) is hilariously inconsistent and poor. It is utterly weird the way they hide/derank posts and comments on instagram and which content they decide to promote. You could like, let your users decide what they want to see and read, but that is clearly not the goal.

Lots of problems this company has the resources and knowledge to solve, they simply do not want to. There is no other explanation. Customer service being what it is is just a symptom of a much larger, systemic problem.

I do believe social media is a blight on society and I don't really care so much one way or another about my account, but if Meta is trying to be what it says it is trying to be, they are completely off the mark and this is just one of a long series of examples.

Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps the level of risk associated with allowing low-level (or even senior manager-level) support staff to transfer ownership of accounts is too high? The level of sophistication of scammers/hackers/fraudsters is likely well above what Facebook would likely employ as support staff. They likely would need to staff paranoid paralegals to ensure customer support doesn’t become yet another lucrative vector to compromise FB accounts.

First, large companies get to substitute fair wages with welfare and social safety nets, now they’re substituting customer service with the court system?

How is this all acceptable? Socializing the risk and privatizing the profit is a moral disaster.

My Facebook account got hacked last year and it was a nightmare. They got access to my ad account and racked up $4k worth of charges.

And, somehow they were able to get into my account over and over again. I’m super technical and careful about these things. Even after changing all my passwords and resetting everything, multiple times, the hacker was able to steal my account.

After being locked out for several days, I finally managed to reclaim access to my account through an old reset email that I found.

I changed my account email address and that finally stopped the hacking.

The worst part is that Facebook support completely denied that my account was hacked and refused to refund the ad spend.

It was so obvious that I had been hacked. You could see the spammy ads and the sketchy email addresses that had been added to my ad manager account.

I tried everything and Facebook told me that there was nothing suspicious.

I finally went through my LinkedIn network and found someone who works there and they helped me get the issue resolved.

Horrible experience.

I don’t know if it is still the case, but at one time you had to pay something like $50 to talk to a 3rd party customer service agent for the government agency that issues US Passports. The reason was because they hadn’t had a funding increase (and couldn’t legally raise prices) in 30 years and had to choose between making passports and answering questions about when the passports will be made. So they decided to make passports and contracted a 3rd party who would provide and charge the customer for customer service.

To me this seems like a reasonable option for massive free services as well. I did see people have had mixed results with the $15 service. Maybe there should be a one off account recovery fee that is priced at a rate that makes this more attractive to Meta so that they can adequately staff it.

I helped several friends and acquaintances get their accounts back when I worked for Meta. Befriending an employee is still the best way to get traction.

[I no longer work there and do not speak for the company.]

Not a single one of those friends or acquaintances used two-factor authentication or other safety features, nor did they follow basic best-practices for keeping any online account secure.

A user != a customer. I can tell without exaggeration that almost every adult on this planet with access to the Internet has a Meta account. That's well over 4 billion people. Each of those users brings in a minuscule amount of revenue by viewing ads. In exchange for the pittance, Meta gives them tools to socialize, communicate, be entertained, market their businesses, etc. that are clearly worth many thousands of dollars to some users.

Of course they want to keep users happy and recover stolen or lost accounts (who wouldn't?), but with so many, it's impossible to help more than a tiny fraction of them. Verifying identity and matching it to account is especially difficult and time-consuming. To do it for free for everyone would be suicidal. They'd have to hire 10,000+ more people just for that with close to zero ROI. The simple fact is that Meta's users value Meta more than the value those users give Meta in return, so it's not worth it.

Apart from two-factor, premium supported accounts seem like the right solution here for regular users to balance the value trade.

Since this is the topic, I'm going to post my own recent experience with Google/Youtube: (also with the hope that a good soul can assist/give pointers)

I have a YT channel with a short-feature documentary film I uploaded 13 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nz4N2K64o8). Last year YT started sending emails that channels with inactive accounts will start being deleted. So I have been working on logging on my channel account which is a Google ID tied to an email on my own domain (startingupinamerica.com) on which I still get emails. I still have the correct password to this Google ID, and 2FA was never enabled.

Google will not let me log in, as they insist on sending a verification code to a phone number I no longer own since years ago. Support requests keep sending me to a guide/process that will repeat the same thing again and again and that if I don't have any option that's that. All I get are the emails that "someone is trying to access your account" when I try to login.

I have been wondering what is the resolution in this case, it seems it's either know-someone or going to court (and risk getting banned?).

A similar report from r/facebookdisabledme earlier this year:

Taking Meta to Small Claims Court got my account back from a permanent disable https://old.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/comments/193d5xo...

I guess small claims court is one way to force a real person to respond. Seems like a class-action opportunity is lurking here for an enterprising/clever attorney

Sounds like dealing with these suits and various AsG is still cheaper than building a support organization.

I've been "engaging" with Facebook to delete my account, and it does feel awfully like I'm talking to an LLM. We entered a circular argument with me asking exactly why I needed a new email address to delete my account, and Facebook telling me that I hadn't provided them a new email address.

https://roffey.au/2024/deleting-a-facebook-account.html

Like the OP I'll be sending a complaint to the government, in my case, Australia's Privacy Commissioner. I'm not super optimistic about whether they will do anything, having dealt with them in the past, but I'm still giving it a shot.

The best way to do business is with FB is, sadly, through various overseas spam companies. They get results, the prices are reasonable, and you never have to worry about having an ad account being banned because they'll just make more for you.

If you try to do it any sort of legit way, and you aren't spending $100k/mo, FB simply does not want to talk to you and does not care. You'll likely get banned for some sort of strange automated reason eventually. Doesn't matter how innocuous your ads or messaging are. And if a CC transaction ever gets denied for some reason—you're toast.

I pretty much never use Facebook, but a while back I got restricted front the marketplace after listing a car. A boring list detailing the state of a car has to be the least offensive thing possible, so I assume some bot had an aneurism, but my appeals got denied and I was never able to find out what I supposedly did wrong. Something like this does sound like a good middle finger to them had I actually had any interest in getting it back.

I recently wrote an Ask HN post[1] about obtaining my trademarked X & YouTube handles (neither is registered by a user/both are being “protected” from being registered by the respective platforms).

Since 2022 I’ve worked with legal/support teams and successfully climes my trademarked handle/username from:

Meta (IG & Threads) Microsoft (GitHub) Reddit TikTok Amazon (Twitch) Kick

Similarly, no user had registered my trademarked name on those platforms either, but I couldn’t register it because they were all “protecting” the name/brand from being registered.

Of note, Meta’s legal team was the most responsive and transferred me the accounts within 24 hours of sending my Trademark Notice, following a couple back and forth email confirmations.

Unlike every other platform a Discord user did in fact register my trademark and is holding himself out as “CEO of {trademark}” with the “TM” trademark emoji following the trademark. After authenticating me as the owner of the trademark Discord’s legal team concluded they could not determine who the actual owner was and informed me I would have to sue the user and give them a copy of the Court Order. Really bizarre they would throw their user under the bus, not consider I could also name them a defendant, and that Discord was confused as to the owner of the trademark meets the legal burden of proving trademark infringement (likelihood of confusion standard).

I detailed my frustration in the post of not being able to actually speak to a human at X or YouTube, which would no doubt immediately resolve my requests like every other platform. I even noted in a comment the likelihood I’d have to file lawsuits to actually speak to a human which I believe would result in an immediate resolution/settlement.

Perhaps I will sue X, YouTube and discord, but I really shouldn’t have too and these companies should pay damages when a customer can show no human support was ever given.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030899

What other remedy do you have when google/facebook/etc corp removes your business account? Facebook/Google are basically monopolies, and they sell their services for businesses.

This isn't removing you for breaking TOS, this is just mistakes that cant get a remedy because there is no customer support.

If Social media companies want to sell business services, you paid for a service, a TOS doesnt remove legal obligations and doesnt overrule state/federal law.

So people turning to their state AG and courts, makes sense.

I had an very active artist page as a musician in several bands and projects for years. Many videos and photos and posters that I stupidly either didn't back up anywhere else, or it was scattered amongst other pages or hard drives. One day, woke up and it was all gone, the page was not there or any trace of it. I tried to find out what happened and never could and eventually gave up.

> "The company’s official help pages steer users who have been hacked toward confusing automated tools that often lead users to dead-end links"

the internet feels more and more a hostile place.

i find myself constantly getting frustrated with bs like this.

like fucking passwords that expire every month and have some voodoo criteria. like don't try and outsource your internal secruity on me bich.

In case someone from Meta is reading this, sharing posts through facebook JS API is broken since yesterday, it redirects to https://www.facebook.com/share_channel/

I tolaly understand the problem. I got locked out of my account years ago and despite being all the steps I was never able to regain access.

The only thing that saved me was my chance I ended up doing some work for Facebook and as part of the induction process they fixed it for me.

Doesn't meta require new users to show a copy of their ID and a photo or video of them holding it near their face? Shouldn't that be enough rigor to recover a lost account? Perhaps with a credit card purchase that is also in your name?

Meta antipatterns

Fasted way to delete your account: post porn

Fastest way to undelete your account: small claims court

After failing to add my new credit card to my business Instagram account - it's locked me out. The "request review" form doesn't work on their page. Fun times. I'm literally trying to give them money.

related: AT&T / fairshake arbitration https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/business/arbitration-over...

fairshake realized that AT&T TOS had some protections against suits + mass claims, but did allow individual arbitration; and AT&T pays an arbitration fee for every case that is filed

It isn't meta's fault the system is set up to incentivize this behavior, and it isn't wrong of them to do what is in their best interest.

Now that we've discovered the loophole just legislate it closed.

1. make the loser pay court fees or arbitration fines

2a. the court fees grow by some percentage with each loss over the last year. lose 1, pay 1x; lose 100 pay 10x etc

2b. the court fees are proportional to the losers net worth or capital

I like proportional fines the best since things like speeding or parking tickets can be ruinous to one car while the next won't even spare a thought for the cost of it. We should all feel the weight of the law equally.

Does the maximum amount you can sue for in small claims go up with inflation?

I’m young enough that I never had reason to create a Facebook account (my friends never socialized on it), until a couple days ago—I wanted to buy something on Facebook marketplace. I thought, this is how Facebook stays relevant while creating my account. Of course, in order to prove me wrong, my account was instantly suspended. I was asked to provide a verification selfie, which I did, but I haven’t heard back.

It’s amusing in a depressing way that these anti-bot measures hit so many people.

Also true for PayPal account holds .. much longer ago than for Meta.

Externalizing the costs can make the unprofitable look profitable.

Oh! That's how I could've gotten my account back

Small claims based customer service is the high water mark of enshitification.

Miss when engadget was pro-tech