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A "right to speak with a human" makes sense to me on an industry-by-industry basis, in the same way that construction companies and restaurants have different r

A "right to speak with a human" makes sense to me on an industry-by-industry basis, in the same way that construction companies and restaurants have different regulatory agencies and checks. Applying it to all businesses sounds like a bad idea, however. Financial institutions? Certainly. Healthcare companies? Makes all kinds of sense. But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support.

BoppreH 5y ago
> But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support. Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing. Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence. It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of any human at Giphy. You get a call from your company's HR. Giphy definitely needs human customer support.
- lghh 5y ago
  Has this actually happened? Additionally, you are not a customer of giphy. So now giphy has to reasonably have the amount of human customer support for non-customers? So, essentially everyone on earth?
  - BoppreH 5y ago
    The scenario above was fictitious, but people need content removed all the time. Here's an article [1] from The Guardian about Pornhub being slow to remove revenge porn and CSAM. And in this thread you'll find a business owner trying to remove a bad faith review. Yes, you'll need more staff depending on your business' impact on people's lives, regardless if they are "customers" or not. If you have so many complaints you can't pay enough people to deal with it, you should not be in business. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhub-untold-damage-pain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
  - bckr 5y ago
    Aren't there laws in some jurisdictions requiring a company to provide and/or delete all data about a customer upon request? In which case there absolutely must be a way to contact someone, in order to facilitate this process.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. Giphy has the choice of one of two extremes: provide human customer support to everyone, or provide no customer support predicated on the idea that take down requests necessarily require human level support?
- SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
  No, Giphy really doesn't need the "right to speak to a human." It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar. Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image. Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS. And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls. No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.

BoppreH 5y ago

> But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support. Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing. Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence. It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of any human at Giphy. You get a call from your company's HR. Giphy definitely needs human customer support.

lghh 5y ago
Has this actually happened? Additionally, you are not a customer of giphy. So now giphy has to reasonably have the amount of human customer support for non-customers? So, essentially everyone on earth?
- BoppreH 5y ago
  The scenario above was fictitious, but people need content removed all the time. Here's an article [1] from The Guardian about Pornhub being slow to remove revenge porn and CSAM. And in this thread you'll find a business owner trying to remove a bad faith review. Yes, you'll need more staff depending on your business' impact on people's lives, regardless if they are "customers" or not. If you have so many complaints you can't pay enough people to deal with it, you should not be in business. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhub-untold-damage-pain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
- bckr 5y ago
  Aren't there laws in some jurisdictions requiring a company to provide and/or delete all data about a customer upon request? In which case there absolutely must be a way to contact someone, in order to facilitate this process.
- kelseyfrog 5y ago
  Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. Giphy has the choice of one of two extremes: provide human customer support to everyone, or provide no customer support predicated on the idea that take down requests necessarily require human level support?
SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
No, Giphy really doesn't need the "right to speak to a human." It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar. Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image. Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS. And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls. No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.