Facebook Too Profitable To Hire Customer Service Representatives, Spokesperson Tells NBCNews

(Disclosure: This writer quit Facebook in stages, unfriending the final batch on Feb 14, 2018.) Time and again the large very profitable company known as Facebook (which owns Instagram and WhatsApp) nudges a public conversation into absurd territories. Imagine the platform that you log onto to connect with friends is profiting off of every ad impression that results from pages that cause you pain by saying Sandy Hook, where your child was murdered, was a hoax.

A story reported this week by NBCNews, says one parent has tried to contact Facebook for years, yet the company claims it cannot engage users or find a long-term solution because it has too many users worldwide (and the company spent an extra $1 million on Washington, D.C. lobbying this year compared to last year, so the megacorporation just cannot afford to engage the little people that make its site obscenely profitable):

When asked if the company algorithmically flagged content with “hoax” or “crisis actor” alongside names of prominent recent tragedies to the company’s moderation team, the Facebook spokesperson said it did not, but it is considering future technological solutions.

The spokesperson said the company has had internal discussions about a potential hotline or a formalized way for victims of high-profile attacks to talk to an actual company representative, but it may not be possible with a user base of 2 billion people.

Software can be profitable because it can serve more customers with fewer paid employees. It lacks the physical-world speed bumps of the analog world, so it has great potential to scale. When a software company says it "can't" hire user service representatives because it has too many users, that means it "won't" hire them because they don't want to cut into their profits.

To be fair, it's a programmer's discipline to automate tasks with code instead of doing them manually. It's a discipline to resist the temptation to do things more quickly in the short term on a smaller scale.

It's a citizen's discipline to stop using Facebook.

That company does not like to submit to pressure. Of any kind. So the parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook in 2012, begin year six begging this very profitable company to at least flag in their AI any post with both the name "Sandy Hook" and the word "hoax" for internal review, but the company has not submitted to that request. And has not responded (which is an act of submission) to the Sandy Hook parent mentioned in that NBCNews story.





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.