> That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.
You've been brainwashed. How can you seriously make this statement?
Meta has $200 _billion_ revenue.
Amazon employs _1.56 million_ people worldwide.
Meta could absolutely hire a million support workers and handle the appeals. They don't, but they could. Smaller social networks would be ideal, but not the only option. You can legislate a requirement of human support availability for gatekeeper platforms.
A quick way to discredit your own point is to confuse revenue with profit. Never mention revenue when you are trying to claim companies can afford to do X or Y.
Grocery stores famously have large revenues but very narrow profit margins so they can’t afford anything expensive.
Meta’s profit was $60 billion in 2025. That’s the number to use in examples like yours.
I wholeheartedly agree companies are doing so bad on customer support nowadays, but I'd argue that there will slways be more fake users than any size of human customer support can take, especially in the age of AI.
This all goes away if you require social media companies to charge users for access. The addiction to free stuff is what’s really killing the internet.
You think feds won't pay for bot accounts? Record labels already pay for botted streams, so I'm pretty sure MOSSAD would pay to bot Facebook. Hell, it already happens on X.
The problem mentioned in the parent comment was the volume of fake accounts overloading customer support. If it’s no longer free to create spam accounts for phishing etc, the profitability of scamming will shrink and decrease the incentives. I don’t think feds are exactly slamming the support queue.
More importantly than the bot problem, it would decrease social media usage in the aggregate while also encouraging more competition. Much easier to bootstrap a business if you’re not having to compete with big tech offering the same thing for free because they can subsidize the losses.
You should read reports of how Amazon drivers and warehouse workers are treated.
In any case, hiring more support staff doesn't change the quantity of that stuff.
> You suggest they should scale up the support team, I said they should just scale down their whole business.
Oh no, I always agreed with you that what you're saying should be what happens. But there's zero chance of that happening, as only the US can really do this, and it won't unless the candidates for 2028 are not the current frontrunners.
Requiring human phone support however is something e.g. the EU could very reasonably do and get away with.
> You should read report from those support workers. How many disgusting image they need to see each day.
Nonsense. You're talking about image moderation when somebody else is talking about appealing when their account is shut down after an accusation of being automated. There is 1) no one being (overly) traumatized by basic customer service, and 2) no reduced responsibility for removing child pornography from your platform if your customer service is terrible.
Companies as large as Facebook (really all of the American Big Tech) should just be illegal.
It's long overdue that we remembered that the very notion of a corporation is a creation of society. Corporations have no natural rights whatsoever because they don't naturally exist. It follows, then, that societies have the right to impose any limits and prohibitions when chartering corporations that don't discriminate against their owners (i.e. so long as restrictions apply uniformly). This includes limit on company size, its marketshare etc.
They already are illegal, laws are just not enforced. We don't need more laws, we need enforcement. It's the same in the EU. If GDPR laws were probably enforced the yearly fines would be a magnitude higher than they currently are. But they're still too scared because of the defense and gas reliance.
It stems me positive to read this by a user with a 2012 HN account though! Nice.
In US at least, the current interpretation of our anti-trust laws (after Bork's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox) is such that it is not illegal - you have to prove harm to users, mere market dominance isn't sufficient.
If you mix in the spammer and bad actors, it makes sense to just say no.
The solution is, of course, have smaller social networks.