Here’s the biggest problem with big tech. Too many people think this behavior is just ok. ಠ_ಠ
Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
131–140 of 423 posts
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#132Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.
It is indeed a massive ethics issue, but that's actually the aspect I love the most about it: Due to the ethics/compliance/corruption aspect, it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#133I wonder if it'd be more effective to make a platform for victims of wrongful account suspensions that helped them to purchase ads targeted at likely ad buyers, highlighting the wrongful suspension of the individuals. These are advertising companies, they'll likely care if their customers are getting negative press from their victims constantly.
Since obviously FB/Alphabet/etc aren't going to allow negative ads targeting their own platform, you post them on a different platform.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#134Professor Robert Kiltgaard said corruption = monopoly + discretion - transparency. He wrote this about political systems and bribery, but it also applies here.
https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2014/05/27/klitgaards-m...
Many tech companies have a monopoly on their market, infinite discretion, and zero transparency. It's a wonder nobody has thought of a "facilitating payments" startup sooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitating_payment
Everyone in the comments seems to think that this is a bad deal for the employees and that may be true at $500/unban. But imagine you're someone making $300k/year where all your accounts rely on 2fa codes sent to your email or you're someone with an social media-based business. You might pay a lot more than $500 to get your accounts back. And not everyone in Big Tech works in San Francisco. There's many people in low cost of living countries (e.g. Europe) that make half as much as Americans. Needless to say, people that earn less are more susceptible.
While I'm not condoning bribery, I'm surprised that the near-unanimous reaction of other commenters is that bribing employees of social media companies is infeasible. Historically speaking, any system without transparency where employees have discretion to do things that others assign monetary value have been corrupted.
Tech companies should take this more seriously, because once people are accustomed to making payments to get fair treatment from a decisionmaker, it becomes very difficult to change that behaviour.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#135Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.
> fire you for doing that No, a good company would realize that AI-based false positive account suspensions is a problem, is killing small businesses and creators in droves, and should hire more human paid employees people to take care of account suspension appeals and help reduce the false positives of the AI algorithms. Hand an additional bonus to the employees who were willing to be the first iteration of this add…
However, they had the opportunity to fix the issue already and didn't, so assuming they would suddenly see the light rather than taking the approach you quoted seems rather optimistic.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can go from "corruption" to "extortion" real fast. Employees can start banning accounts to make them pay
Except this is legal. Extortion is a serious crime, especially when businesses are involved.
Being in breach of your employment contract is insignificant compared to the seriousness of criminal extortion, but it's not nothing.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#137Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.
It is indeed a massive ethics issue, but that's actually the aspect I love the most about it: Due to the ethics/compliance/corruption aspect, it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.
Love your optimism. I wish I was as optimistic as you. My guess is that they’ll fire these employees and not improve their processes.
These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#138How do you verify that the requestor isn't just some Joe/Joeline Schmo who's account has been blocked for no reason, as opposed to someone who has been legitimately blocked, say for CSAM or other legislative reason, or is otherwise operating against the service's TOS? When Mike Meta gets canned because he's tried to un-suspend an actual terrorist account (because you know that they're monitoring internal mentions), a…
The same way problems get resolved when someone's sob story goes viral? Presumably an employee sees it and files a ticket that says "hey this stranger is having problem XYZ." Then a support person investigates and takes the appropriate action.
(Just a guess, I don't know the process at Meta.)
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#139On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired. On the other: $150 I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. I can’t imagine risking that for what is essentially an hours pay for most tech roles there.
> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this.
For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help:
When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day.
A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help a real personal friend with an account issue, and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation. Months later, he was investigating data for a project, which triggered an audit. They walked him out the door the next day after finding it.
So: yeah. This is not a very good business idea.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, as someone who works for one of these companies, no fucking way would it be worth the risk to me.
Here's my question not to you specifically but the royal you of any bigTech employees reading this forum or similar: why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this…
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