Even years after leaving, I still get these requests. So I built a marketplace for them. Let me know what you think!
>California Code, Penal Code - PEN § 641.3
>(a) Any employee who solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept money or any thing of value from a person other than his or her employer, other than in trust for the employer, corruptly and without the knowledge or consent of the employer, in return for using or agreeing to use his or her position for the benefit of that other person, and any person who offers or gives an employee money or any thing of value under those circumstances, is guilty of commercial bribery.
>(b) This section does not apply where the amount of money or monetary worth of the thing of value is two hundred fifty dollars ($250) or less.
Even if the price is less than 250, I don’t think it’s hard to argue that a long-extant social account with many followers is worth far more
From my perspective, lockouts seem to be an unchecked extortion ring run by social media employees and/or on platforms to make money... Social Media in itself has always been somewhat of a grift, and it's created all kinds of opportunities for scammers to be faceless and to coordinate activities that mislead people... It's shameful, but all part of the building story that will be epic to read when it all collapses.
Social media pushed NFTs, Crypto, Influencer Culture, and all kinds of other "Fake It Till You Make It" schemes, we can really do without it and go back to independent web communities, it will be painful for a little while of course, but far better than just getting 30 views on a post promoting your business because you didn't pay them money for more views... Social Media has always kind of been extortion in a way, they want your time and money for returning very little entertainment/business value.
These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
The underlying issue is "it costs money to have people doing this, and we don't lose any money by not having people doing it."
My guess is that the site will see a burst of activity where corporate security departments successfully bait employees into breaking the law / company policy, and word will get around pretty fast that you will get fired and possibly charged with a crime...
...and then the companies will sue the site owner, citing all the employees they baited.
Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the employee is using their authority to let in randos. If the company is smart, they mark accounts that have been lifted by internal employees, so they will discover the first time it happens.
The best probable scenario for this is that said employee gets fired. Presumably, the company trusts said employee knows who they are vetting because they are risking their job; and I'm confident they would not be happy knowing they are using this service. But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.
At the very least, if this site is a joke, it should put up a disclaimer that indicates such. Not just a disclaimer to vet the rando, because I doubt an internal employee can do so any better than the customer support can. It should actively remove functionality like sending or publicing emails so that posters and developers can't actually use it to contact each other and exchange money.
That would be a positive outcome.
The two-tier system is bullshit and creates a bubble that further insulates companies/employees from feedback about broken processes, because everyone in their social graph is exempt.
Far better they have to deal with friends telling them how bad the public appeal process is.
That feels like a good outcome to me. "I know a guy" should not be a reason to get preferential treatment. As much as I'm sure it absolutely sucks to lose an account on most of these services, I'd rather they stay lost for everyone, rather than get reinstated for people who happen to have connections.
I don't know why you think people who deserve to be suspended would be reinstated. You act as if these people have no agency or discretion as to what accounts to reinstate.
I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.
"What's really your favorite band, then?"
"Beatles, I guess."
If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.
On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.
It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.
The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
Wait, no, not like that
you seem to only be thinking about one side of this, the company side. what about the endless amount of normal end users that got caught by some god awful AI, and ignored by a huge tech company and its basically non existing customer service?
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 additional human labor and helping improve the quality of the platform.
Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.
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.
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.
Spin up a random account, get it banned, then ask an anonymous "employee" to get it unbanned.
If it is? Verification by result.
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.
Sounds like they need better controls, there shouldn't be ways to inadvertently access personal data and violate someone's privacy. Particularly not at such a mature company.
However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this issue. They clearly do not feel the negative comments on some techy nerdcentric boards or twitter followers amounts to enough to cause a negative impact on the bottom line. So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech.
To me, these services are more indicative of "Big Tech" failing to create effective appeal processes to meet their consumer's demand... While I'm sure there isn't a lot of money in it, it'd be great for Big Tech to examine how they could improve on this front.
The legitimacy of the need for this service proves the value of these accounts. I predict that tech companies will get in on it, and within a few years will offer paid customer service the way enterprises get today. You can already pay for “verified” accounts, so this is the next step. If companies don’t monetize it, government will regulate it.
Good! That would be a fantastic outcome if that's all plsfix accomplishes. Tons of people would be willing to pay for support but it's just not offered.
Is the spirit of this service corrupt? Absolutely. Does it undercut Big Tech's checks and balances? %100. Is it morally lacking? Personally I think so. Is it illegal though... ehhhh? It might be shocking but not every term found on a FAANG's term and services agreement is legally binding.
Services like these are inevitable so long as humans are corrupt but typically only pop into public consensus when the institution has failed so spectacularly that the average consumer has completely lost faith in them to adequately address their problem. While I'm not condoning corruption, clearly the Big Tech companies have failed in providing adequate solutions to this problem and I feel our time is better spent examining the negligence of these institutions which caused the problem rather than the malicious service looking to exploit said negligence.
Don't see much dishonest. And honestly, it may fall under a bribe, but bribe implies the person in power was the one who affected you. Which clearly isn't the case here.
In my eyes, this is just making a public service of something we 100% know people who make tech companies profitable already have access to.
This service feels capitalistically egalitarian!
https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
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), are you on the hook for that?
Honestly, the risks here outweigh the benefits. Not sure why anybody would do this in the first place.
"6 figure job with stable income" vs "one time payment of $100 from rando on the internet"
It's a no brainer.
Honestly smells like a sting operation to me.
(Just a guess, I don't know the process at Meta.)
Building a platform to bribe your way through the opaque customer non-service system of these companies is either low corruption or high art.
On the other hand, I guess life does imitate art sometimes...
These companies claim that people can make a livelihood, or save their digital lives with their services, but the dark underbelly seems to be that for any reason, these companies can erase you, and even worse, you can “bribe” an insider to get things back. Its an elegant way to expose an issue that you only really might see a random youtuber complain about. How much more widespread should you allow this to get?
Instead of writing an article for wired, create an app to bring attention to an issue.
Society at the mercy of customer service so bad that we revert to bribes.
And the techbro answer is an upstart third-party for-profit service to facilitate the bribery, complete with a launch on HN.
And it's a marketplace, with offers, for libertarian bonus points.
I don’t see how he can guarantee you’ll be anonymous for long.
Remember who the true hero was. He wasn't in it for long.
But what actual law is being broken here? I suspect it is legally a bribe, because it is facilitating a non-routine action. But only because of that non-routine bit. Would it be possible to prosecute this, going into court and admitting that your suspension appeals process is non-routine?
And what part of a standard employment contract is being broken here? Taking money to perform a service your employer does not offer? And interestingly, if the employer does offer the service, then it is no longer a bribe but a legal facilitation payment (so you would want a clause in the employment contract to prevent this)
(Not rhetorical - looking for answers to the above questions)
In many ways, this process already happens, and even expected by all concerned. More than once I've seen twitter personality manages to get some decision reversed seemingly only because they could make enough noise, often ending up on the front page here. The difference is in the currency used to pay to bypass the system.
It's called "commercial bribery", though I believe state law generally covers this sort of thing, so things will differ depending on jurisdiction. Someone else posted[0] the text of the law for California. (In CA's case, if the amount is under $250, the law doesn't apply, but there are quite a few "bounties" on OP's site that are above that level.)
> And what part of a standard employment contract is being broken here?
I'm not sure if it's standard, but many employees have signed things that say they won't accept other employment. Not sure something like this would count as "employment". But I also wouldn't be surprised if some employment contracts have broader language around this, more to the effect of "no outside paid work".
I don't think I'd be okay with a platform like this. The ethics around it are questionable. But I think it's important that you don't take on a dependency unless you personally know at least a few people at senior roles at the company you'll be relying on.
And I'm not at all happy with needing to rely on contacts. These companies should not be able to get away with potentially destroying other businesses or adversely impacting peoples personal lives and just handwave the reasoning to be "the algorithm". People should have recourse.
Having everyone pay for support that actually delivers would be fine in theory, but that doesn't really work out either. It would just punt the problem down until you hit it again. Even if you're paying for support, you're still likely to hit a human who just regurgitates a script at you and is unable to resolve the issue. Oftentimes, escalation is needed. If your support agent is unwilling to escalate, back channels are the only option. Having internal friends raise a fuss is one method that sometimes works, but going viral on Twitter/HN are other ways that people accomplish this.
The reality is that people who are more well-connected have advantages. Someone with a large social media following or a business that's more well-known will always get better support than someone unknown. I don't know what the solution to this would be.
I'm not familiar with the details of the bubble.io platform that this seems to be based on, but from a very casual look, it looks terrifying from a security viewpoint. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more data leaks.
You might run this as a honeypot for corrupt, dumb employees. Make it more easily accessible than the outreaches from criminal enterprises.
if a FAANG employee would be considered dumb when signing up for this... how can this not have crossed OPs mind when spending his/her time building this platform (as an ex-FAANG)?
No way would I risk my stable 6-figure job for some random to get their account unlocked. Especially not for "$100" lol.
If the account was locked for fraudulent activity or worse, something illegal like CSAM. That paper trail will easily lead back to you. Bye bye job and possible investigation by authorities.
On the upside, at least you will get "free" security from the FBI when you are put on the watchlist.
they just botched a bunch of the deletion/suspension processes, in a way that made them unrecoverable
This service throws all of that out the window.
Personally, I look to the FCC and like bodies to implement the required governance norms: if you offer freemium services to people, you have an obligation to implement real-person interaction on account suspension, and a mediated access path to your effects inside the locked-down digital store.
These identities now fuel our access to governments, and public services. If you can't access your google account you can be blocked from legal documents.
I know "caveat emptor" and all that.
Yes, very well stated, this exactly. If you have a hold over how people interact with others or organize their lives or do business, you should offer reasonable processes for addressing issues e.g. lockouts that could impact them seriously. It's the sort of process that should exist: if your email account got shut, what if the helpdesk refused to ever tell you why or how it could be reopened? It's too late to move (social media) providers by then.
If it becomes large, I imagine big tech companies would try to fight it, but let's cross that bridge when we get to it.
Lawyers usually serve this role in the US.
Never received a response.
I'd kind of like this for stuff like that. Bypassing horrendous or non-existent customer support.
I never once received a response from Google. I tested my account maybe a year later and it was unlocked.
Doesn't seem like a real service, what employee would risk their job for a few hundred dollars.
Maybe it is a dig at how the customer support for these huge companies is so poor that this seems like a real thing.
Tech companies know customer support doesn’t scale and they don’t have a strong enough incentive to hire customer service people. Automating away these “cost centers” of labor is largely why tech companies have grown to have the highest market caps in the world.
Until we address this incentive issue, tech companies are going to keep eliminating jobs that require lots of manual labor through automation. Or the free market will solve it for the highest bidder.
But, if real, it's an huge unethical breach for bribery, privacy violation, and will only benefit illegal content. A real customer using this will never be accepted again on those platforms.
this sentence doesn't make sense
Once you add money into something, there is a whole level of scrutiny and legal and ethical implications.
Like others have been saying, this is the type of thing that will get you fired immediately. You are not allowed to take your internal access and go into business for yourself selling it.
I fucking hate shitter for locking me out of my account but I refuse to pay ransom to get it back.
I instead stopped using social media besides anonymous social media and my mental health improved immensely.
I only remember because I am still trying to get into my Gmail account for which I have the username, password and recovery email.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899787
"Enter FaangSupport. FaangSupport connects you and me to verified (via email) Faang Volunteers. When complete, the main interface will be an Inbox like layout, through which you can create tickets and correspond with a Faang employee."
The free market: this website
This website is absolutely insane, and it’s insane that the creator doesn’t seem to have any awareness of how insane it is, judging by the about page.
However, I can’t lay too much blame on the creator when it’s clearly emblematic of a much larger problem.
What if the money was donated instead?
1. Not all employees have access to account and user data in any medium+ size company
2. What one does in their own time is personal business but what one does in their own time on company IP is not personal anymore. The person might even get fired, the karma point or couple hundred are not worth the risk.
3. This just creates a channel to identify the weak links in human chain for phishing attacks
Ironically instagram was not even in the list for selection for the form
Since obviously FB/Alphabet/etc aren't going to allow negative ads targeting their own platform, you post them on a different platform.
I was an idiot and my 18 years old reddit account got hacked. Figured it out in a few hours, did a password reset, I change the password but I still get invalid password after.
It's been 9 months now without a reply from support. I wished I'd have paid for reddit gold or something to have an actual legal base to do something.
If anyone from reddit is reading this, it's the same username as here.
I’m sorry, I just can’t help but be cynical about this. These platforms have next to zero actual customer support, the AI inmate is running the asylum and the users suffer the most.
I'm not sure this is the win for malicious actors that people claim it is. It's gotta be cheaper to buy/make a new account that pay to recover an existing one.
will @jpdpeters instagram account by restored by May 31st?
the person that predicts this most correctly with the largest position was the person in control of the outcome
and you can then just make a feed of these kinds of predictions to your “market” of employees
Anyone at these companies can sign up with their @company email address, post an “urgent bounty” and 10 minutes later show up at your desk to fire you.
Though I am sure that a lot of money has been made through these types of services, just not out in the open.
In short: One more morning I woke up and it was shadowbanned for no discernible reason, I used the appeals page, the appeal was granted with an apology... but it wasn't actually fixed, and I can't contact anyone because the appeals page says my account is already back to normal and refuses to accept any input.
... Oh, and reusing an old throwaway account to ask for help led it to be killed the exact same way.
Well, at least I'm spending more time on other hobbies I guess.
One must minimally respect the risk to publicly post a self-created novel concept as such.
With such confidence. Awesome marketplace - I hope it helps save some time ultimately.
I tried to submit a request, but it gave me an error about sendgrid credits. I guess the site is already a huge success.
In practice this would be premium plans that include some form of special treatment.
2. Payment fraud (which also would be a huge issue on this site if it was to ever take off).
I’m pretty sure people will be fired for doing this.
Talk about misaligned incentives. What’s stopping employees from intentionally messing with accounts to get paid to fix them.
Nice work anyway. Maybe you could market it for bugs/issues rather than just account suspensions. It reminds me of https://xkcd.com/806/
So let's have a thought exercise: what would it cost, in dollars, to have a hyperscale web service that doesn't have this problem? In other words, a Facebook/Google-equivalent web service of some kind that has a public a link to a 'mistakenly banned appeal' form for anyone to use.
The constraints/spirit of the exercise are that the volume of worldwide engagement with our hypothetical service needs to be equivalent to engagement with Google/Facebook (and equivalently appealing for ToS-violators to abuse, leading to a comparable volume of automated bans). Auto-ban systems and ToS are similar to Fb/Google as well. The product doesn't matter a ton. Maybe it's a social network, or an office/email suite, whatever.
The difference is that ImaginaryCorp honestly strives to provide a ban-appeal process equivalent to what you get if you know someone who works at Google to absolutely everyone. Let's say they promise a verdict within a calendar month, with at least some amount of useful explanation.
The review process can be automated within reason, but not if it violates the goal of reducing abuse and false ban rates to the level that a Google employee can expect when they submit their uncle Doug's marginally-suspicious banned account for internal review. ImaginaryCorp really believes in the spirit of that goal, so they're not willing to compromise on the review process much. Yeah yeah, it's implausible that belief in the spirit of the goal would be present at every level of the company. It's a thought excercise about monetary cost, just go with it.
They won't half-ass it and just grant everyone's appeal because the have a similar commitment to Fb/Goog to not losing users after becoming a cesspit, are subject to CSAM etc. laws, and generally care about not being a clearinghouse for abusive content.
Doing this would probably require a lot more human review (unless Google is for some reason sitting on a way better auto-ban system and not using it), and as a result would require a massive staff and process edifice to execute that, keeping false-positives to a bare minimum, on a global scale. Financially, the business has to remain sustainable with this system in place (but not necessarily successful or growing on par with competition).
So the question is: how much would this cost me, the user? Even if ImaginaryCorp runs ads like Fb/Google, would that account-review edifice require subscription fees to not run the company out of money? If so, assume users act like shitty free-but-your-data-and-clicks-are-the-product users and not like paying customers, so legitimate abuse rates stay high (again, thought experiment). If there are fees, how much am I paying a month--$5? $50? $500? Or would running this review system just mean that the company is a little (or a lot) less profitable than its competitors?
It's an interesting question to think about. The requirement of providing useful explanation to legitimately banned users actually complicates things a great deal, because it might lead to gaming the system. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge: high-social-context groups of reviewers would need to be present all over the world. Staffing is an even bigger challenge if you opt to solve issues "at the source" by fixing the auto-ban systems themselves (which results in needing to solve realtime moderation at scale, a notoriously intractable problem). Automation is tempting, but risks falling directly back into the issue we're trying to solve.
In the real world, this would obviously never happen, but I'm interested in what you all think.
So far, I've gotten decent feedback from my former colleagues and friends in big tech. Most of them take some sort of compensation for helping restore Insta / ad accounts - this is just a more direct way.
Cheap!
But not only that, you’re likely endangering the jobs of the people who take up your offers.
Seems icky. I am all about generating side-income streams by connecting people with needs to those who can fulfill them. But this is not it. I would recommend you take whatever you’ve built and apply it to a different problem.
What about monetizing Reddit AMAs? Things like that are a lot more useful and apply to a much wider range of people.
...
(I shouldn't have to mention this, but please don't build the torment nexus.)
I have a very old account with a 4 letter username. I used it sparingly for years. I had made my profile pic the same as Trump and wrote proud cuckold & 45th president of the US during the election as a joke. The background was Trump golfing in unflattering photos. I lost access to the email address I created the account (I still have the email address name, the account password, nothing else has changed) because the recovery email was from college.
They may have sent me a warning to that address, but I have never seen it. My account was permanently suspended. I wish I could just go in and delete the existing content / make a normal profile page / fix whatever is offensive.
Elon had said there would be 1 time amnesty for all suspended accounts, but it never happened. I appealed at least 5 times over the years, but it was always upheld. I would pay for that account back.
I posted about it here multiple times. Some posters offered suggestions -- if I was in the EU, they said, I could invoke the "right to be forgotten", and Instagram would legally have to remove my account. Unfortunately, I do not live in the EU.
When Meta Verified was launched late last year with a human support feature, I paid the subscription fee and created a support ticket. They asked for screenshots and videos of the problem, but ultimately said there was nothing they could do. Stubbornly, I kept at it, and over 100 emails later they finally fixed the issue by resetting the email that was linked to my account.
My question is: why didn't mine take 5 minutes?
What if I route the payment through a third party like my lawyer Mr. Cohen
When you accept money from someone, it doesn't matter who physically hands you the money, it matters who caused the money to be given to you.
How can you tell whether someone is a vegan or into CrossFit? Because they will tell you about it.
Thanks!
Emergency Room staff willing to get you looked at faster because you think you are “really sick”
Building inspectors willing to sign off on your home house wiring because you’ve “done it for years and it’s fine”
Burning Man ticketing because you swear your internet was fine but died at noon on the sale day.
Dang because your downvoted comment was just misunderstood and deserves more upvotes.
/s
This service places no responsibility on the requester to prove they have a real case. And in some cases (like the second) there is potentially true and measurable harm if in fact the petition should in fact be unequivocally banned or blocked from a service.
The only problem being I refuse to work. Was hyping to post sexy pictures of myself to maybe get a girlfriend but that didn't happen.
