Facebook – abysmal algorithms and customer disservice

Facecrooks nails Facebook/Meta on (at least) two of its less attractive attributes.

Firstly, its reliance on artificial intelligence, in this case using a faulty algorithm to correct a faulty algorithm. Presumably because AI works out cheaper than human eyes for fact-checking.

Secondly, its lack of commitment to customer service. Its refusal to consider issues where it’s at fault after an arbitrary period of time is not news to me: I was previously alerted to it by a friend who cannot regain her account from the hands of a scammer because she didn’t report it quickly enough. (In both these cases, the victim simply hadn’t been aware of the problem in time to make the arbitrary cutoff date.)

I can see that there’s a difficulty in that Facebook apparently doesn’t keep data after 180 days, so the cutoff date reflects the fact that there is ‘no evidence’ on which to re-examine the case. But this doesn’t excuse inaction on FB’s part because ‘nothing can be done’. In the case of an account takeover, surely the ongoiong use of the hijacked account to send scam messages is sufficiently clear to justify remedial action. In the case of the algorithmic confusion – the victim  teaches the programming language Python and the related programming library Pandas, so the fact-checking algorithm assumed him to be trading exotic fauna – the original page data may be lost, but surely the lifetime ban on his using Meta for advertising could have been corrected?

Reuven M. Lerner’s article, as cited by Facecrooks, is here: I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python.

David Harley

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Check Chain Mail and Hoaxes authored by David Harley. Read the original post at: https://chainmailcheck.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/facebook-abysmal-algorithms-and-customer-disservice/