No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands. Dispute resolution is what courts are
for. Meta
already pays taxes that fund courts.
If courts are unable to keep up with demand generated by the modern digital economy, let's fix that. Making losers pay court fees would go a very long way towards solving the problem.
Re: Walmart, the other option is to just cut the aid. People won't work if they are not able to sustain themselves (calorically) on the pay. The best way to avoid these antipatterns is to stop enabling them.
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Edit in reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744676 (rate limited):
There is another solution to this problem: reputation. There inevitably will emerge a spectrum of reputability among eg. used car salesman. It is your responsibility to manage your risk in regards to the reputation of the person you are transacting with, attend to the specifics of your deal, and to do your due diligence. So much is obvious in the world of business.
Also, in a world of prompt dispute resolution by efficient courts, with losers paying fees, shady businessmen who repeatedly violate contracts will quickly find themselves out of business. The problem we have is that our courts work on an 1800s timescale. We can fix this.
Re: social media, standards are already emerging. For instance the much contested device attestation standard attempts to fix exactly this problem. It'll work itself out in a decade or two, no intervention required.
> one of the roles of government regulation that can create a net economic gain
I disagree in principle. The role of the government of a free society is to create a nonviolent liberal ecosystem. Not to interfere in the outcomes that ecosystem produces.