Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose. Not that showing up means a win.
I'm surprised that someone had trouble serving a subpoena on Facebook. Looking up "Meta" in California Corporation Search brings up everything with "Metal" in it, which is a hassle. Their actual company name is "Meta Platforms, Incorporated". Search for "Meta Platforms" here.[1] California company registration #2711108.
Subpoenas are sent, using a process server, to their registered agent, which is Corporation Service Company in Sacramento, a business which exists to receive subpoenas for other companies. And, conveniently, there are process serving companies with offices in the same building, and you can find them by searching for the address of CSC and "process server", then ignoring the spam results.
Most small claims court web sites explain all this.
To me this appears as a way to outsource customer service to an external entity funded by a cash flow to which Meta does not need to contribute. The courts are always going to exist, Meta is always paying its lawyers, so why bother hiring extra people to staff a support line?
And by making support have to go through the legal system you've already cut out 90% of the support calls you would normally take.
Financially, the entire arrangement is a huge win and cost saving for Meta while at the same time completely overwhelming the publicly funded small claims court. This is not dissimilar to how many Walmart employees require government Aid because Walmart won't pay them enough do not require it.
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.
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.
I half-agree with the above, which is that loser-pays is a good system and it's necessary to stop enabling companies.
The problem with your theory is that market forces incentivize firms to take action that reduce everyone's profits/benefits so long as the action is individually profitable for the company. Which is why there are "lemon laws" on selling used cars or food regulations.
The used car industry as a whole benefits when consumers are willing to pay more. Customers are willing to pay more for a used car if they think it will be high-quality. However, an ethically questionable used car salesman will try to undercut each other by offering low-quality cars that immediately break, giving all used car salesmen a bad name. Consumers now no longer want to buy used cars at all and now the only people making money are those selling a bad product.
The point of legal regulation here is to enforce a quality minimum on used cars. This drives the price of used cars upwards. Salespeople get paid more, the customers get better quality, and the world is better off having reused cars that would've been scrapped. Everyone is better off.
This could also be true for social media. Forcing social media to invest in better systems to ban users means that social media advertising can be worth more money. Right now, advertising marketplaces are controlled by the companies themselves. Nobody trusts companies to show ads to real users instead of bots. This drives the value of social media advertising down.
While individually, it doesn't make sense to pay for customer service infrastructure to verify people's ownership of accounts, if there is a mandatory standard, all social media companies would benefit because it increases the value of their products.
This is one of the roles of government regulation that can create a net economic gain.
Sidenote: car sales in general are not ethical. When you go to the dealer & talk to a salesperson, and subsequently talk to the $ guy, you will be required to sign a piece of paper stating that you cannot derive ANY claims on what the salesperson told you, except those written down on that form. And that form is empty.
Also, I wish there was a nationwide requirement for warranty. Not that I have a problem with selling as-is per se, but it incentivizes used car dealers to take in every vehicle they can on trade, erase the codes, and try to sell it. Again, they can lie to your face about how well this car was maintained, how it was taken care off, etc, and you cannot derive ANY value off those quotes.
I find it insane that in 2024 I cannot get a print-out of a car on how well it was maintained, and how many times it was floored on a cold engine.
Most US states have the concept of "Lemon Laws" that provide consumer protection when buy used cars.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law
That said, this economic paper is pretty legendary at this point: <<The Market for Lemons>>
Summary: <<Akerlof's paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. It concludes that owners of high-quality used cars will not place their cars on the used car market. A car buyer should only be able to buy low-quality used cars, and will pay accordingly as the market for good used cars does not exist.>>
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
The Market for Lemons is legendary only as an example of economists ignoring reality to pursue their pet theories. Reality is closer to that explained in Mediations on Moloch.
The theory that the removal of lemon laws would result in a more informed consumer base has no basis in reality--economists need to spend less time theorizing about how economies work and start looking at actual economies to figure out how they work. We had decades of consumers not becoming informed enough to differentiate between a peach and a lemon before lemon laws existed. That's decades of proof that The Market for Lemons is wrong. That should have been caught in peer review, and that should have prevented the paper from being published. The fact that this absurd paper won a Nobel Prize should call into question the validity of the prevailing ideas of the entire field of economics, at least at that time.
The market for cars of uncertain quality will always have a floor on the price because people don't have a choice except to take a risk on buying a car of uncertain quality in an economy where the car industry has successfully dismantled public transportation infrastructure. Given this inelastic demand, dealers can leverage consumer ignorance to sell lemons as if they were peaches, and the consumer suffers. Hoping consumers will educate themselves is a solution that doesn't scale; it is unrealistic to expect consumers to become experts on cars, computers, phones, medical devices, and every other complex product just so they can avoid being sold inferior, broken products. It is clear that the only solution that works is for experts on products, i.e. the sellers, be held accountable when they knowingly sell low quality products as if they were high quality.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
In the UK every car has a registration document with the previous owner's name and address on it. You can assume a lot regarding whether you want to still buy the car based purely on this information. It's surprising how many people overlook this simple step and rely upon warranties and such which are,often, not worth the paper they are printed on.
I am not sure this is a good idea in the US where even voter ids are controversial.
A better alternative is simply to require companies to pay a living wage.
The outcome is better, because you don’t lose the safety net for those who still need it.
ah yes, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
Edit: It's an awful thing, and has failed every time it was tried, usually with unspeakable horrors inflicted on incalculable numbers of people. Many would rather die free than live in shackles, even if the shackles are of gold. Imposing involuntary obligations on people is indistinguishable from enslaving them.
"Ultra-capitalism" is just the state of nature without the violence. It is distributed rather than centralized authority. It is a liberal ecosystem in which organisms compete, succeed, and fail. Allowing people to bear the total consequences of their failure and misfortune is not immoral.
If you can't sustain yourself, the immoral and undignified thing is to impose on others. The only decent thing to do is accept their charity when freely given, not elect tyrants who will take by force.
Democracy is not an aim, it is a means to liberty. And an imperfect one at that, which I would be glad to see replaced when a better option becomes available (AI?). If the power of the government threatens the freedom of the people, the government must be replaced. So much is written in the constitution.
I'm not sure why you didn't just reply to my comment instead of updating yours.
Anyway, your points are ridiculous on the surface. You're deliberately conflating communism with democratic center-left policies, but they are not remotely comparable.
There are plenty of places in the world - most of modern Europe, for example - which have social safety nets where "unspeakable horrors" are not being "inflicted on incalculable numbers of people".
This is complete nonsense. All societies impose involuntary obligations. You can't just do what you want in society and get away with it. You can't deliberately hurt people, can't speed in your car, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, you can't forge your signature or deceive people into giving you money; force is largely monopolised by the state, limiting your freedoms in all sorts of different ways. You call to the constitution, the defining document of the US government, as if it doesn't impose any obligations on you. But you then say it requires you to revolt against the government.
The problem with arguments like yours is that you pick and choose what you consider to be "involuntary" obligations. I'm sure you feel that the very real involuntary obligations imposed by property law are perfectly OK with you, despite that, taken to its extreme, this literally creates a system of indentured servitude, examples of which include bankruptcy for getting sick, and lifetime loans for getting an education.
This whole liberty-or-die thing is just as corrupt. Your kind of liberty is strictly about the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, with no obligation to the liberty of others. All you care about is your "positive freedoms", the freedom to "do", but you couldn't care less about the more important freedoms: freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from homelessness, freedom from pain.
These freedoms are the most important freedoms of all; without them, true liberty is impossible.
This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state.
There is a vast difference between outlawing violent behaviour and mandating cooperation. The latter is indistinguishable from slavery. Free societies don't compel the cooperation of their citizens beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself. Even being conscripted into the army, which is slavery, can be justified if it is to defend against a foe who would destroy liberal society.
It is however categorically not justified to mandate contribution to various insurance schemes and welfare programs. There is no picking and choosing here. I want my interactions with the state to maximize for consent[1]. I want the ability to out out. I am not owed medical treatment if I'm sick. I would like the ability to choose whether to incur an obligation or not.
Yes!
No. My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins.
These aren't freedoms, they're obligations. Obligations on others to provide you with food and housing and emotional support (freedom from fear? really?). Obligation is exactly the thing that free people aim to be free of. Being free isn't the same thing as being taken care of. It's about being able to do whatever the hell you want, and interact with others on a consensual basis.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8
It's really not. That's the line pushed by Enlightenment thinkers (e.g. Rousseau, Hume) who didn't actually know what they're talking about. A few centuries of anthropology later and we know that a lot of other societies are characterized by mutual aid. One randomly chosen example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2801707
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Ultra-capitalism is no better than ultra-communism. They are both systems designed to reduce democracy and to funnel all the money into the hands of a small number of elites.
I prefer to live in a society where people can feed themselves, or get sick, or lose their jobs, without losing their house or going bankrupt - regardless of the ideology de jure.
This is a truly horrifying, compassionless comment. You're literally suggesting starving people.
Sure, cutting these programs means eventually Walmart changes their business model. But the people who suffer during that transition aren't Walmart shareholders, who experience what, a temporary 30% loss in their share price? The people who suffer are the workers; Walmart has replaced thousands of smaller local stores which used to provide jobs, so the workers cannot necessarily find other work.
Walmart has plenty of runway to play a game of chicken here: oh, you want to cut aid? Let's see if that idea lasts one or two election cycles. In the mean time workers, as you say, are "unable to sustain themselves (calorically)", i.e. starving, because their options are either continue working for Walmart for not enough pay to eat, or quit, and get no pay to eat.
I mean, I agree this would cause a mass quitting at Walmart and the hundreds of other companies that employ the same strategies, but where do those workers start working? Companies as a whole can just afford to refuse to raise pay for a while in most cases and try other business models in the meantime. Even if other companies are started which outcompete Walmart by paying their workers a living wage, it will take decades for those companies to grow to the same size and provide as many jobs.
We don't have to make these changes all at once. I agree doing so would be somewhat disruptive. We can roll back the aid over a period of say 5 or 10 years, giving workers (and companies) time to figure out what to do.
I agree it may not be tenable in a representative democracy, but my point is that means the democracy is too powerful and encroaches on fundamental liberty. Government should not have the power to redistribute assets in pursuit of the "general welfare", and indeed it did not until US v. Butler (1936) gave the government sweeping power to do basically anything.
We don't need to give companies time to figure out what to do. We already know their solution, because it's the same playbook they've always used: change no business practices, and spend a fraction of that cost on lobbying (bribes) and propagandizing for the change to be reversed. A tiered rollout just gives them more runway to do this. And more time when workers suffer.
Instead of trying to predict what will happen based on your ivory tower economic theory, try predicting what will happen based on what has happened, i.e., reality.
Your opinion continues to be a horrifying, compassionless take: you openly admit it would "be somewhat disruptive", but the suffering of workers is a sacrifice you are willing to make for your pet ideology.
More to the point: why would we even want to give companies time to figure out what to do? They have had plenty of time to do the right thing and they chose to do the wrong thing. I'm not for punitive justice, but I'm also not particularly concerned if the solution to the problem harms those who knowingly and intentionally caused the problem.
Fundamental liberty applies to humans, not corporations. Corporations do not have fundamental rights, period. And just as fundamentally, when government does not limit the power of corporations, corporations step into the power void, gain too much power, and take away people's rights and liberties. Being for corporate liberty is being against human liberty, it's as simple as that.
Yes, I understand that the SCOTUS ruled that corporations are people: the SCOTUS is wrong.
Yes, I understand that corporations are made up of people. But the actions of corporations are chosen by a small, small fraction of those people, and benefit that same small fraction of people. That small fraction of people disproportionately get to exercise any rights that are granted to a corporation, often at the expense of many more people lower in the corporate pyramid. Granting freedoms to corporations is effectively the pigs in Animal Farm saying "you're all free, but some of you are freer than others" because you're granting those rights to the decision makers in the corporation and not to the workers.
My argument isn't that corporations are people. My point is that the government should never have been given the power to redistribute wealth the way it does today. It has not always had this power. And had the constitution been slightly clearer, it would not have this power today. No amount of lobbying would change that.
I am looking at reality, namely the reality of the US before the aforementioned decision giving the government broad power over the "general welfare". Society more resembled a liberal ecosystem. People were individually responsible to negotiate for their own prosperity.
It is my fundamental liberty that is being violated by forcing me to contribute to the maintenance of strangers. I would like the freedom to opt out of this mandatory insurance scheme.
It's not compassionate to force your view of compassion on others. It's tyrannical. In the vein of "If you're against gay marriage, don't get gay married": if you want to help people, contribute to charity. Don't force your views on others.
So I take it you're against Lemon Laws or other avenues of consumer protection?
Yes! We just need better, more effective, more efficient courts, more capable of coping with the demand generated by an increasingly interconnected economy. Lemon laws are just a hack to paper over the side effects without addressing the root cause.
Edit: I see a world where small claims can be adjudicated online, not terribly differently from how lots of customer service works, with the added advantage of an impartial mediator and a clear process of appeal.
Interesting. I think I would prefer a world where companies would do right by their customers and there be no need to take them to court, but if it was indeed accessible online then hey maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Either idea seems like starry eyed optimism, I'm afraid.
I'm really annoyed everytime I go to buy groceries and I can't find any bread cut with alum and plaster of Paris, or sweets coloured with lead.
Actually, I'm not. To think that everything should be mediated by markets is just typical libertarian capitalism nonsense.
Reputation doesn't scale. Fixing problems with the court with much more expensive that preventing them from happening in the first place. Information and power asymmetries are real.
That's exactly it. These corporations are leeches on society.
The economy will continue to improve the more this leeching can be minimised and ultimately eliminated. Interest rates have effectively forced Silicon Valley VC to stop funding more leeches, but society is still left with some truly gigantic ones to deal with; they have embedded themselves into the system. Their removal will take time, and patience. Lots of work to do.
How are they leeching?
by outsourcing liabilities to the public
But are they actually doing that? In this case people are using it for that, but I could also use small claims court to get the attention of a plumber who won't send me a quote. That doesn't mean that plumber is outsourcing to small claims court.
Theres a scale difference. Many platforms are mini countries.
Hell - this article was about a tiny number of American citizens with the patience and resources to learn how to get this done.
If you are in Myanmar, PHP or many other countries, you are SoL. It’s the one thing that grinds my gears on these topics.
The more I see it, the more I think people are going to split these firms up.
Okay, but this is not the same as "outsourcing your customer service to taxpayers".
If it pleases you, feel free to ignore this sentence. Instead focus your attention to the first sentences of the response.
A plumber is not a firm the size of an economy, with bad customer support.
yes, most of the economy actually works by privatizing gains and externalizing losses.
in your example it would probably be you abusing the court system for something that it is not intended for yet obligated to handle
This is a recent trope; it's not really true. Gains are the only things that are taxed. Financially, we tax gains and let investors absorb losses.
I can't imagine the circumstances under which a plumber would be compelled to send you a quote. Your analogy makes no sense. What legal theory are you thinking of there?
I'm not saying they would be compelled to. The legality of quote obligations is not really what the analogy is supposed to highlight.
I'm guessing there's no court fees that the losing party has to pay? It would seem fair to tell the troublemaker to pay for the judge's and other court employees hours...
At least my state requires the losing party to pay court costs. Let me guess that big companies simply don't pay.
Even though it's much more expensive to lose a lawsuit over an issue than it is to resolve it through customer service, most people choose not to sue. Facebook can fulfill all of their current legal requirements by simply not showing up to any court hearings, losing by default, and paying whatever someone won. If that is cheaper than providing real customer service, they will do it. And real lawyers cost $100s/hour so if the amount FB has to pay is less than that they're losing money by showing up!
This applies to all companies, but the average Facebook user doesn't even pay for an account and are of even less value than a typical customer support line user (notably, the article says a benefit of "Facebook verified" which costs $15/month is actual support).
Not showing up is an arbitrage opportunity which means everyone can sue Facebook and get a win for free, which would not be sustainable.
Is the arbitrage opportunity worth it? It doesn't seem like it is considering the limiting factor being the court system, and you can't really arbitrage off cheaply off miniscule enough violations to profit more than a few one off cases. Damages must also be present, so maybe a service to service offering where one party disparages you online and then you take Meta to court for not suspending that party would work, but thats fraud, and if found out you risk quite a bit for sums that seem to not really exceed more than $15,000 across the US (from the article).
Pity the people who are not U.S. citizens. Meta is the worst.
Big companies not paying court fees is not a thing in any state.
Also big companies not paying court fees in the state they have a ton of assets in is not going to be a thing either.
No way FaceBook is going to let somebody foreclose on their data center over court costs.
Court costs are HEAVILY subsidized by the government that has jurisdiction over them. I would guess nobody is paying more than around $400 to sue Meta in Small Claims, and if the case drags on for months or years with continuances and (if the court allows it) discovery, then it is going to burn a ton of time from the various court staff, building upkeep, web site maintenance and all the other things that keep the courts running.
I've had Small Claims cases that have run to thousands of hours of court time over multiple years.
If you read the article, the second paragraph tells about someone whose costs were $700 (significantly more than $400), and even explains why they were so high: the need to travel to California to appear in person.
You're saying that spending thousands of dollars in court settlements and man-hours for each of these cases is somehow advantageous to Meta?? That they want to be sued?
If they bothered to appeal, I expect Meta would win most of these cases. As long as there are very few of them, it's not worth the cost. Trying to twist the situation to seem like this is somehow a good thing for Meta is well... twisted.
Also, as someone else pointed out already, Meta pays taxes which pay for those courts. The guy flying in from New Jersey does not.
If they wanted to handle this using minimal automation, they could.
Q.E.D. It has been demonstrated by their system design.
If they could handle it using minimal automation, they would. They can't, so they don't.
Figuring out which real human owns an account that was never verified to belong to that human in the first place is not easy to automate, if possible at all. It's expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. And if not done carefully, it makes it far easier to steal accounts than it already is.
I understand that many commenters have magic wands. Unfortunately, Meta does not.
Have they been getting sued until recently?
Meta Lawyers have to do something. Dealing with account recovery cases, is a much better position than many other types of liabilities
They would contract this work and pay a few hundred an hour. Internal counsel would not be cheaper since they staff based on the demand. None of this is free, it’s just less costly than customer service.
The article says that small claim court has $100 filing fees - considering that every case is heard for 10 minutes, it sounds like small claim court should be able to mostly if not completely self-fund.
10 minutes is nowhere near the correct timeframe and $100 is nowhere near enough to cover the court’s costs.
Even if it's 20 minutes -- which it often isn't -- that's $300/hour. If that's not enough to cover costs, well, maybe the costs are out of line.
At the scale of these tech companies and the number of customer service issues the courts would be overrun and this hurts the other cases. Courts can’t scale, even at $100 per small claims case filing fee they are losing money, Courts aren’t meant to be profitable businesses nor even self sustaining, they provide a public function and service paid for by tax dollars.
I doubt many people would pay $100 to have their customer service question heard. No one's doing that for "how do I reset my password?"
At some point the courts might start complaining to the legislatures and the congress. Or they might start adding punitive damages to their rulings.
Generally speaking, I don't think small claims courts can add punitive damages.
Where they can it's a statutory provision. For example, litigants who bring lots of nuisance suits.
It isn't this.
It's because if meta mistakenly gives the wrong account to the wrong person, the potential losses are huge.
Whereas if a judge gives the account to the wrong person, meta isn't liable.
There is nothing else they can do when someone set up their Facebook account 15 years ago and has lost their email address and phone number from back then.
Doesn't Meta pay taxes?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform....
Wtf? No. This is just the legal system in operation, if it were by facebook they would not offer this type of users, they have to be ordered to by the judicial system.
There is no deliberate decision to do this at the judicial level, there is only a decision not to willingly do it at all.
Why isn't Meta getting hit with punitive damages for this crap?
If Meta needed to cough up a million dollars to the state of California every time they lost one of these, they'd set up a proper customer service line tout suite.
I know that small claims is limited in what it can award to the plaintiff. However, I don't think that applies to punitive damages against the defendant.
My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it means I have to go somewhere in person to show my ID.
I don't actually think it's unreasonable. Meta probably earns $2,000 in a span of a few seconds. They can afford to provide users with basic services such as account recovery, that allow users to use the services under the terms that were agreed upon when the user's account was created.
Meta might make a lot of money, but the profit per user is probably quite low, and they make up for that by having billions of users. Customer support scales with the number of users, not the profit overall.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost (on their end) of a single customer support call to meta makes you a net financial loss for them. And how many customer support reps would they need to handle support for billions of users speaking every language on the planet? All that funded from advertising? Yikes. I suspect running a properly funded customer support line might be able to put the whole company in the red.
Doesn’t that just mean that the company is externalising its costs and privatising the profits?
Frankly, I think this is the problem that needs to be solved.
On its own, no. Rasberry Pi not providing phone support isn't externalising any costs.
TFA is explicitly about Facebook externalising its support costs to small claims courts. If RPI was accused of the same thing, I'd feel the same way.
Anyway, as I understand it, RPI externalises support costs to retailers. I can certainly call my RPI supplier and talk to someone. Externalising commercially is totally fine, externalising to the public is up there with pollution, perhaps a kind of tragedy of the commons.
I think part of the "deal" with free services like GMail, Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, and so on is that the services only work financially because there isn't any customer support. If you forget your password, or your account gets hijacked or something, well, you don't actually make the companies enough money to take your troubles seriously.
Arguably, this is fine so long as the customer knows in advance that that's the deal (hence the EULA). And I think the courts acting as a back stop for that is a good thing. (Though I'd want Meta to foot the bill for the court's costs if they're found to be in the wrong).
Maybe another approach would be for Meta, Google, etc to charge customers for customer support. "Hotmail is free. If anything happens and only a human can fix the problem, it'll cost you $2/minute to talk to our service reps. So we don't have weird incentives, we set the price so our call center breaks even exactly - we do not profit from having a bad service. If the problem turns out to be due to a bug on our site, at the rep's discretion they can refund the money.
You can speak to a human whenever you want, but call centers aren't free. You have to pay us to do so."
I don't disagree with that, the main problem is that such a service doesn't exist, and so it goes to the public purse instead.
Except that because they are "free", they drive out any semblance of competition which would serve as a check on the super shitty customer service.
As an alternative solution, I'm all for splitting up Meta, Google, etc for being anti-competitive.
If Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Hotmail, etc. all had to stand on their own without being able to share revenue from other sections of the company, the "free to prevent competition" would go into the trash can where it belongs.
That's the American way
Small claim courts has filing fees and courts mostly pay for themselves. There is no real externalized costs other than to users who do not have reasonable way to recover their account. That's the deal with using ad supported services.
'I suspect running a properly funded customer support line might be able to put the whole company in the red.'
Well, maybe it should?
Account recovery is actually extremely tricky as it's very time consuming to verify that user is who he says he is. Hackers are really good at social engineering and with AI even video checks are not realiable.
The only way to make it robust is to bring it to physical life with real ID and photo/face check - that will cut out on 99.99% of abuse and impersonation attempts. The problem is that it is extremely expensive and frankly can't be funded from ad revenues.
My experience is that you can get all your Google issues resolved if you show up to Mountain View in person and ask politely. Might a similar strategy work for Meta?
I’d love to hear the story behind this
Revenues might be a better measure. Otherwise, sites like Wikipedia would have to block themselves to comply.
Wikipedia is still multi-million dollar company with lots of employees. There should be an opportunity to pay Wikipedia $1000-5000 or whatever amount is reasonable for them to verify and remove a clear case of defamation. Right now your only option is to pay editors under the table.
Has anyone who took them to court included an affidavit pointing to the thousands of previous instances as evidence of a pattern of negligence or whatever, and asked for punitive dates to be awarded?
You mean like introducing evidence of prior bad acts used to prove actions in conformance? This is both 1) not admissible evidence under FRE 404 and 2) not how you get punitive damages.
Punitive damages are (generally) specifically made available by statute, and often have to do with fraud. Because fraud has some men’s rea elements, you’re not entirely wrong to look to prior bad acts, but it’s not as simple as, “they did this many times so this time they must pay punitive damages.”
Thanks, great answer!
That might not be good for any individual case. The reason it works is because each individual claim is "not worth it" to Facebook to fight. Once you're the one asking for punitive damages, suddenly you'll get a lot more resources resisting your case.
Different topic, but I find not enough people are aware of the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) complaint process.
If some financial-related company wrongs you and you can't get through to support, file a complaint. Suddenly they listen and contact you back.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
+1 to CFPB
My account at Venmo was banned with zero explanation and no support would talk to me on the phone. I submitted a complaint to the CFPB, got a phone response within 2 weeks, and was promptly unbanned.
Is that a violation of something? I thought the TOS gave them the ability to freely ban anyone at will.
The typical response from companies is indeed to hide behind their TOS. You can read the public complaint data:
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-compl...
But if they show a pattern of misleading consumers, stealing money and blocking complaints by hiding behind an abusive TOS, eventually if enough people complain that can lead to rulings that they can't get away with that anymore. So it is important to file every complaint.
In an ocean of government dysfunction, the CFPB is quite a beacon of hope. An agency that takes citizen input, listens to it and gathers statistics on abusive trends and eventually, if there is enough evidence, acts on it.
Why do the companies care? Huge fines?
In the case of CFPB, while individual complaints aren't necessarily resolved (not sure what percentage might get solved, I guess it is low), they keep stats on the quantity and kind of complaints they're getting for a given company. If there's a consistent pattern of misleading or mishandling customer transactions (I don't know what the thresholds might be) the CFPB can eventually show up at the company HQ, make themselves at home and start asking a lot of questions.
That's why it is important to report all unfair financial practices by these companies that have no support and make unilateral decisions that you can't appeal. While your case might not be resolved directly, it contributes to these stats that eventually lead to regulations that stop the abusive behavior.
Unfortunately this is state dependent. Good on California for not allowing an appeal if you don't show up.
In Texas, it's not uncommon for companies to no-show their small claims court date because they can immediately appeal for a de novo trial to a county court (which has more rigorous legal proceedings that give lawyers an edge).