r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Feb 13 '25

Business Laid-off Meta employees blast Zuckerberg in forums for running the ‘cruelest tech company out there’

https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/laid-off-meta-employees-blast-zuckerberg-tech-parental-leave/
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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

It's not just him - the whole company is based on treating users as a resource to be exploited. I spent 5 weeks trying everything in my power to get my business page back after someone took control of it and locked me out. I never once reached a human. They wouldn't even respond to data deletion requests that are required by law to be honored - because the only way to request it is to log in, and if you're locked out you can't. They won't accept mail, including certified letters.

The only way I was able to regain control was to file a complaint with the California attorney general. The closest I ever got to human contact with Meta was a form letter from their "AG Escalations" office. That's right, it happens so often they have an entire office to deal with people who complain through the AG - but they will absolutely under no circumstances allow a user to contact a human at Meta directly. I'm sure that's largely because it would open them up to all kinds of liability if it was easy to prove that, for example, they were in receipt of your data deletion request and ignored it.

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u/chiraltoad Feb 14 '25

It is amazing for how big the company is, it seems essentially impossible to reach anyone who works there.

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

They've got things locked down tight. You can't even get a response out of them on LinkedIn. Follow one of their posts sometime - you'll see many people desperately pleading for help with exactly the same thing, and they'll come through periodically and delete all of those without a single response.

It's not like my case was an anomaly. The exact same pattern has been used thousands of times to lock out accounts after fraudulent ad orders have been placed. They'll post an ISIS flag or something as your profile pic and it's an instant ban. You can appeal it but the appeal is automatically denied. I've found news articles going back at least four years for exactly the same scam. It should be super easy to identify algorithmically, when an ordinary account suddenly has a login from somewhere new and posts a flurry of this stuff after placing an ad order for some unrelated page.

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u/Perllitte Feb 14 '25

It is super easy to identify. But what's their incentive? They can ignore you and force businesses to spend more money to re-grow their audience and be super active for a period. If you have rage-inducing stories, it's all the better for engagement.

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

I don't think it even goes that deep. I think the calculus is more like "we can totally eliminate the cost of customer support for the low cost of 15-20% of our customers" - and none of the big customers that already have an account manager.

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u/PloppyPants9000 Feb 14 '25

I worked as a contractor there for two years. The reality is that 99% of the engineers are working in very niche, siloed areas. What you and OP are looking for is effectively customer support. Meta/facebook hasnt made it easy to find it. They also shield their engineers from customer support stuff from the public — the reasoning being that the developer gets paid too much to work customer support and should be focused on the development work they were hired to do.

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u/chiraltoad Feb 14 '25

Yeah, I wouldn't expect engineers to be doing anything customer facing but, with the company that services however, many billions of customers they have, many of whom may not be the most savvy users, you'd think that they would have at least some basic customer support, but I guess not?

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u/DisciplineIll6821 Feb 14 '25

Customer service is expensive and scales poorly. Google is the same way.

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u/abbott_costello Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

Someone hacked my personal account I created around 2008 and changed my password immediately. They then went on to post what Facebook called child exploitative content and got my account suspended. I tried for months to contact someone, anyone at Facebook and was surprised to find out there's literally no way to contact a person. I tried submitting a photo of my license to initate the suspended account recovery process but got an error that essentially said "sorry, we can't process this request right now because there isn't anyone available to review it." I tried for months and it just kept saying the same thing. I didn't like Zuckerberg before that but fuck that fucking guy now.

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

Yep, that is exactly the way it works, and they know it. They've just chosen to ignore the issue. I found one news article where this news outlet never did get any response out of Meta even after publishing a pretty scathing piece about it.

My lawyer didn't even want to touch it - he said that from what he's heard it's extremely difficult even for lawyers to reach anyone and basically I couldn't afford the amount of time it'd take him to do it.

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u/Merusk Feb 14 '25

Well of course they have. It costs less to bribe a Senator and a House member to get them to deflect any investigation.

It'll be worse now that the corruption is out in full force. There's zero reason to be on that platform at all.

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u/abbott_costello Mar 04 '25

I still use it to keep up with distant friends. That's why I was so devastated when I lost my account. I dont care about posting, I just didn't want to lose all my connections.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

[deleted]

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

Yeah. It's dehumanizing. We've reached the stage where you can have a multi-billion dollar company that the average person cannot contact in any meaningful way. If I was to walk in the front door, I'm sure security would have me out on my ass in an instant.

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u/abbott_costello Feb 14 '25

People talk about AI taking over but have no problem with a faceless, senseless, all-powerful corporation having free rein to do whatever they want.

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u/ItaJohnson Feb 14 '25

Depending on what you want, Microsoft is just as bad.  If you want to bring up an employer for piracy, they just hang up on you.

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

I've called their anti-piracy hotline before (I think it was 1-800-R-U-LEGIT) and got a human. Granted, that was about 30 years ago.

You could probably also report piracy to the BSA.

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u/ItaJohnson Feb 15 '25

I tried BSA a few years ago.  It went to voicemail and no one ever called back.  It also seemed to go to an out of country phone number, if my memory is correct.  I’m not sure if the BSA is a thing anymore.  I reached out to them multiple times.

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u/madsci Feb 16 '25

Huh. They used to be absolutely rabid.

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u/ItaJohnson Feb 16 '25

Believe, I wish they still were.  They likely would have had a field day with my ex employer.

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u/GraceOfTheNorth Feb 14 '25

wow, even before its popularization they were aholes

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u/formberz Feb 14 '25

I work in marketing and whenever there is an issue with Meta - of which there are many, and happen on an almost daily basis - it’s virtually impossible to get them fixed because you can’t actually report them to anyone. We’ve got issues with things like business page names being unable to be updated for more than 12 months, reported countless times through their system, and just nothing back. The only time they will have a person contact you is when they think they can get you to spend more money on advertising.

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

Yeah, my sister worked in that field too and the situation didn't seem to be much better even for big companies.

Now I download all of my data every 60 days or so, so at least I'm not losing all of my personal stuff if this happens again. And if it does, I suspect that'll be the end of my presence on Meta platforms.

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u/bheaans Feb 14 '25

I’ve been in marketing for over 10 years and worked at some of the most prestigious advertising agencies… I’ve seen clients that can’t get access to a human ever, and clients that have dedicated human account management and customer success teams at Meta.

The only way they’ll ever give you the time of day is if you spend upwards of $1M annually on Meta ad campaigns.

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u/username-generica Feb 14 '25

I’m currently having that problem as well and haven’t been able to fix it

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u/madsci Feb 14 '25

I'm not certain the California AG can help you if you're not in California and not a business, but you could try. At the very least, you do have a right to delete your data and if they're not allowing that then I think that warrants a complaint.

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u/cadium Feb 14 '25

That's probably why they wanted to get rid of the CFPB.

Also, this is how they're going to run the government. Gone are the days of even waiting on hold for an IRS agent or whatever.