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I have spent much more time tangled in Facebook over the past week than I would like.
- My account was suspended, then I was blocked from opening a developer profile.
- Managed to get through that, but then the business I set up was disabled, and I couldn’t submit an appeal because they “limit how often you can post, comment or do other things in a given amount of time in order to help protect the community from spam”, and apparently submitting appeals or enabling MFA are included in that.
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There are surprisingly few posts about this on the internet. Mostly it’s Reddit threads with people tearing their hair out because they’re about to lose 15 years of photos, or their advertising business
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I’ve seen more than once in group chats I’m in somebody ask “anyone here work at Facebook? Need an issue resolved”
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Perhaps it is by design?
- There’s a brilliant post on Bits About Money that talks about the phenomenon of deliberate bureaucracy.
The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.
- Scott Alexander talks about it too.
Organizations have a legal incentive not to deny people things, because the people involved can sue them. But they have an economic incentive not to say yes to every request they get. Seeing how much time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is an elegant way of separating out the needy from the greedy if every other option is closed to you.
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The Oversight Board is of no use here. You wouldn’t go to the Supreme Court if the council had an administrative cock-up, unless maybe you were mistakenly deemed to be dead.
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- I’m not so sure. Lots of bits of their website are just broken.
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What really is my course of action against Facebook? Very limited.
- I’m not a customer, though I want to be. It can afford to go without me, and maybe it’s cheaper for it to set up anti-abuse systems that have high sensitivity at the cost of low specificity. (One false negative that blows up politically is far worse for them than denying a load of users access because they’re false positives).
- Even if I were a customer, they could afford to ignore me!
- I can’t really afford to go without Facebook.
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The state is a bit like this. There’s a huge asymmetry in power between it and any individual citizen.
- There are formal and informal mechanisms to prevent it from trampling over people.
- Formal things: human rights legislation; branches of government have certain statutory duties; judicial review; Citizens’ Advice Bureau
- Informal things: the one that stands out is Parliamentarians as caseworkers. I really don’t like that this is one of the main demands on an MP’s office’s time, but apparently it does a good job of unstucking bureaucracy.
- There are formal and informal mechanisms to prevent it from trampling over people.
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What would better bureaucracy look like for Facebook?