Ask HN: Hacker claimed ownership and then deleted my Facebook Page of 50k users

In the OPs case it would be less about getting an actual copy of the data, and more about the asking from the legal team (or some other human). The data I was thinking about was logs to help catch the hacker and a record of all the actions taken on the page (event history), as opposed to the 57k users. Like in the above linked article from patio11 (Dangerous Professional), it's a papertrail.

I agree that it's irritating that a lot of the big companies make it almost impossible to speak to a human, but I understand why. I've been on the other side of support enough times to know that they have to wade through an enormous volume of stupid questions for every one legitimate problem. It just doesn't scale.

There does need to be an escalation path somewhere for items like this, but how do you differentiate between this and the million people that claim their page was hacked when in reality they just forgot the password or accidentally deleted it.

That doesn't make it appropriate, but it does make it easier to understand. Everything is systems at a certain level. Capitalism is one part of that, but also just the sheer scale of it. Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users[1].

Lets say that every year 5% will think they need help, it's an arbitary figure, because I just don't know. They may or may not need help but they come across a problem they can't solve and want to reach out for support. Note: It's not necessarily the same 2.6 billion users each month, but let's ignore that.

    mau = 2.6 billion
    needing_help_yearly = mau * 0.05                   // 130,000,000
    needing_help_each_day = needing_help_yearly / 365  // 356,164

The average time to resolve a ticket is hard to know but I found one example that suggests 8.6 minutes[2]. I have no idea how accurate that is, or whether it's applicable to social networks.

    average_time_in_mins = 8.6 minutes
    support_mins_per_day = average_time_in_mins * needing_help_each_day     // 3,063,013 min 42 s
    support_hours_per_day = support_mins_per_day in hours                   // 51,050 h 13 min 42 s
    humans_needed_for_support = support_hours_per_day / 8                   // 6,381

This is a gross simplification, and you could play with a lot of variables to change these numbers, but it gives an idea of the scale.

Compound this with an attitude that they don't NEED a human in the mix, and the complexities and costs of managing a a support team and it starts to make sense why they don't offer support (even if they should).

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... [2]: https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2019/metric-of...

This won't help you but Facebook seems to have zero interest in such things. After spending thousands in ads my account got finally blocked early 2021 appearantly for advertising the masks my grandmum was selling on Etsy. Appeals were commentless ignored. I lost access to several big groups and pages.

The same happened a few years before with my last real name account, first they asked for my passport, pictures, identifying friends and then still commentless blocked me, removed my pages and groups as well as my semi popular apps.

The reality is Facebook doesn't care.

And if you build any kind of dependency or business around it you are playing with fire.

The problem is the expectation that these services are gratis to users. If users are prepared to pay, this metal community for example would be on its own domain with a PHPBB or similar. Many people do this by the way. Even for non technical topics.

People pay a lot for internet access both through mobile and land connections but are less willing to pay for things on the internet or maybe its the hassle of setting up a site (comparable to the hassle of say buying a car: a hassle but not insurmountable for anyone).

Large number of users is not an excuse as several businesses use Messenger bots to handle common customer queries and handover to humans for escalation.

Heck, I myself have developed Messenger bots with over 100M conversations through them.

So actual `humans_needed_for_support` would be much lesser if Facebook used their own product.

> There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page...

Yeah, the lack of the page does hamper things greatly. I'm sorry again that this happened.

> ...To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either)...

My hope for you is that you and your fellow community members can in fact continue - whether it is on something like Heavy Metal community B, etc. Obviously, your call if you are or not interested in researching other options like the fediverse...Although, you (and other community members) should start thinking of plans for what to do if another hacking incident happens. (I sincerely hope that this kind of thing does not happen to you and your community ever again.)