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Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry a

Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.

leokennis 2y ago
My employer used to have an internal "ambassador app" for employees. If someone I knew used our products and had a complaint, I could put their details and the details of the issue in that app, and they would get contacted on priority. Basically it was a way to positively channel in-person complaints to a structured solution.
JohnMakin 2y ago
For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.
- romanhn 2y ago
  Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhelmed. On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this. I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
  - fmajid 2y ago
    Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employee-hotline-for-faster-customer-support.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ... Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
  Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything, they won't even tell you what exactly you violated or how to return into their good graces. It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    > Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.
  - 2y ago
- loeg 2y ago
  Yeah, but it is intended for organic connections, not adversely selected 3rd parties directly enriching the employee.
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules. The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
  - jsnell 2y ago
    These companies have on the order of 100k employees. It's the job of maybe 0.01% of them to deal with these issues. For the vast majority, a random account having been suspended going to be in scope of their work. It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".
- bagels 2y ago
  There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.
MaxBarraclough 2y ago
Agreed. It's based on accepting personal payment to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants. Sounds like low-key bribery to me. I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The verification email can be intentionally vague and agreed upon in advance. "What's really your favorite band, then?" "Beatles, I guess."
  - morpheuskafka 2y ago
    The best way would be to send an email disguised as spam, and have the employee respond out of band with its contents without actually replying. Bonus points for sending similar emails to random @company.com addresses so receiving the email alone doesn’t suggest involvement.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.
  - atq2119 2y ago
    The time doesn't, the resources do.
thih9 2y ago
At the same time it’s Airbnb for tech support. It just needs a note that people performing the fixes aren’t employees in this context, they’re independent contractors acting in their own name. Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.
darth_avocado 2y ago
This can go from "corruption" to "extortion" real fast. Employees can start banning accounts to make them pay
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Except this is legal. Extortion is a serious crime, especially when businesses are involved.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Being in breach of your employment contract is insignificant compared to the seriousness of criminal extortion, but it's not nothing.
armchairhacker 2y ago
As others pointed out, this is a huge problem in the making. Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the employee is using their authority to let in randos. If the company is smart, they mark accounts that have been lifted by internal employees, so they will discover the first time it happens. The best probable scenario for this is that said employee gets fired. Presumably, the company trusts said employee knows who they are vetting because they are risking their job; and I'm confident they would not be happy knowing they are using this service. But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone. At the very least, if this site is a joke, it should put up a disclaimer that indicates such. Not just a disclaimer to vet the rando, because I doubt an internal employee can do so any better than the customer support can. It should actively remove functionality like sending or publicing emails so that posters and developers can't actually use it to contact each other and exchange money.
- jrockway 2y ago
  This seems unlikely to me. No company is going to fire you because you were trying to help. However, accepting money for this service seems pretty much guaranteed to result in termination even if 100% of the accounts you help with were legitimate. The side dealing is the problem.
  - armchairhacker 2y ago
    I think it's unlikely if the content is benign and it's not guaranteed anyways. But if the person is posting illegal or very graphic content, and the company knows you unbanned them, I think it would raise questions like "how do you know this person" or "what made you trust them?". Which you'll have trouble answering if all you have is their name, email, and the sparse information they gave for why they should be unbanned. You'll argue "this person hid that side of themselves from everyone" but at minimum it calls your judgment into question, and if the company is aware of this kind of service, they'll probe for more information. Also if someone uses this service repeatedly disguising themselves as different people, it will raise questions why different internal employees kept unbanning them. That would be much more suspicious.
dheera 2y ago
> fire you for doing that No, a good company would realize that AI-based false positive account suspensions is a problem, is killing small businesses and creators in droves, and should hire more human paid employees people to take care of account suspension appeals and help reduce the false positives of the AI algorithms. Hand an additional bonus to the employees who were willing to be the first iteration of this additional human labor and helping improve the quality of the platform.
- 38 2y ago
  finally a correct response
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  However, they had the opportunity to fix the issue already and didn't, so assuming they would suddenly see the light rather than taking the approach you quoted seems rather optimistic.
  - 6510 2y ago
    yes, how dare you customer service.
- delfinom 2y ago
  It's a calculation of profit lost to needing more human review costs, vs profit lost because some small fries got banned.
38 2y ago
> If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this you seem to only be thinking about one side of this, the company side. what about the endless amount of normal end users that got caught by some god awful AI, and ignored by a huge tech company and its basically non existing customer service?
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
It is indeed a massive ethics issue, but that's actually the aspect I love the most about it: Due to the ethics/compliance/corruption aspect, it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.
- akudha 2y ago
  Love your optimism. I wish I was as optimistic as you. My guess is that they’ll fire these employees and not improve their processes. These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
  - grotorea 2y ago
    The optimistic view is that they will decide to capture this market and just let people pay a fee for a human review of their account.
    - smsm42 2y ago
      The problem is they have zero incentive to make for-fee service to be any better than the free service. What are you gonna do, turn to somebody else for the same service?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It's hilariously apropos that employees are maximizing their revenue by solving a problem... that their employer created by maximizing its revenue (and underfunding support) Isn't modern big tech always saying that employees should shut up and focus on the numbers / delighting users?
    - vmfunction 2y ago
      With corporatism and capitalism, m maximizing revenue != maximizing benefit for customer and/or society Corporations' business model have not being long term sustainable, most of them have being off setting the hidden cost to environment, tax payers and general public for quite sometimes. Not event sure they can actually delighting users and make money at the same time.
JustLurking2022 2y ago
I'd like to think that but, hiring for a couple open roles posted only internally at a FAANG, I definitely received emails from external individuals inquiring about the role - and found out there's a whole cottage industry around referrals for a fee.
schmidt_fifty 2y ago
[dead]
CapeTheory 2y ago
"Move fast and break things" Wait, no, not like that
immibis 2y ago
Corporations are amoral. Anyone who doesn't want corporations to rule the world must also be prepared to be amoral when standing up to them.
Aeolun 2y ago
So it’s fine if you do it for free, but not if you take the same action for payment?
batch12 2y ago
It'd be too easy to catch the participating employees. Just would have to ask for help and watch logs to see who bites.
chinchilla2020 2y ago
This seems really really easy to honeypot for a security team at one of these companies
crooked-v 2y ago
How many of the bigcorps that are completely blind to user issues are even going to notice employees doing this?
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
Corruption? Huge monopolies companies suck at hearing their customers, so this is addressing a real need. Sounds like free market to me!

leokennis 2y ago

My employer used to have an internal "ambassador app" for employees. If someone I knew used our products and had a complaint, I could put their details and the details of the issue in that app, and they would get contacted on priority. Basically it was a way to positively channel in-person complaints to a structured solution.

JohnMakin 2y ago

For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.

romanhn 2y ago
Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhelmed. On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this. I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
- fmajid 2y ago
  Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employee-hotline-for-faster-customer-support.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ... Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything, they won't even tell you what exactly you violated or how to return into their good graces. It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  > Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.
- 2y ago
loeg 2y ago
Yeah, but it is intended for organic connections, not adversely selected 3rd parties directly enriching the employee.
jasonfarnon 2y ago
Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules. The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
- jsnell 2y ago
  These companies have on the order of 100k employees. It's the job of maybe 0.01% of them to deal with these issues. For the vast majority, a random account having been suspended going to be in scope of their work. It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".
bagels 2y ago
There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.

MaxBarraclough 2y ago

Agreed. It's based on accepting personal payment to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants. Sounds like low-key bribery to me. I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.

actionfromafar 2y ago
The verification email can be intentionally vague and agreed upon in advance. "What's really your favorite band, then?" "Beatles, I guess."
- morpheuskafka 2y ago
  The best way would be to send an email disguised as spam, and have the employee respond out of band with its contents without actually replying. Bonus points for sending similar emails to random @company.com addresses so receiving the email alone doesn’t suggest involvement.
ethbr1 2y ago
> to spend company time and resources doing something other than what the employer wants If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.
- atq2119 2y ago
  The time doesn't, the resources do.

thih9 2y ago

At the same time it’s Airbnb for tech support. It just needs a note that people performing the fixes aren’t employees in this context, they’re independent contractors acting in their own name. Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.

darth_avocado 2y ago

This can go from "corruption" to "extortion" real fast. Employees can start banning accounts to make them pay

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Except this is legal. Extortion is a serious crime, especially when businesses are involved.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Being in breach of your employment contract is insignificant compared to the seriousness of criminal extortion, but it's not nothing.

armchairhacker 2y ago

As others pointed out, this is a huge problem in the making. Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the employee is using their authority to let in randos. If the company is smart, they mark accounts that have been lifted by internal employees, so they will discover the first time it happens. The best probable scenario for this is that said employee gets fired. Presumably, the company trusts said employee knows who they are vetting because they are risking their job; and I'm confident they would not be happy knowing they are using this service. But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone. At the very least, if this site is a joke, it should put up a disclaimer that indicates such. Not just a disclaimer to vet the rando, because I doubt an internal employee can do so any better than the customer support can. It should actively remove functionality like sending or publicing emails so that posters and developers can't actually use it to contact each other and exchange money.

jrockway 2y ago
This seems unlikely to me. No company is going to fire you because you were trying to help. However, accepting money for this service seems pretty much guaranteed to result in termination even if 100% of the accounts you help with were legitimate. The side dealing is the problem.
- armchairhacker 2y ago
  I think it's unlikely if the content is benign and it's not guaranteed anyways. But if the person is posting illegal or very graphic content, and the company knows you unbanned them, I think it would raise questions like "how do you know this person" or "what made you trust them?". Which you'll have trouble answering if all you have is their name, email, and the sparse information they gave for why they should be unbanned. You'll argue "this person hid that side of themselves from everyone" but at minimum it calls your judgment into question, and if the company is aware of this kind of service, they'll probe for more information. Also if someone uses this service repeatedly disguising themselves as different people, it will raise questions why different internal employees kept unbanning them. That would be much more suspicious.

dheera 2y ago

> fire you for doing that No, a good company would realize that AI-based false positive account suspensions is a problem, is killing small businesses and creators in droves, and should hire more human paid employees people to take care of account suspension appeals and help reduce the false positives of the AI algorithms. Hand an additional bonus to the employees who were willing to be the first iteration of this additional human labor and helping improve the quality of the platform.

38 2y ago
finally a correct response
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
However, they had the opportunity to fix the issue already and didn't, so assuming they would suddenly see the light rather than taking the approach you quoted seems rather optimistic.
- 6510 2y ago
  yes, how dare you customer service.
delfinom 2y ago
It's a calculation of profit lost to needing more human review costs, vs profit lost because some small fries got banned.

38 2y ago

> If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this you seem to only be thinking about one side of this, the company side. what about the endless amount of normal end users that got caught by some god awful AI, and ignored by a huge tech company and its basically non existing customer service?

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

It is indeed a massive ethics issue, but that's actually the aspect I love the most about it: Due to the ethics/compliance/corruption aspect, it has a chance of drawing immense attention inside the companies, possibly leading to actual durable improvements on the underlying issue.

akudha 2y ago
Love your optimism. I wish I was as optimistic as you. My guess is that they’ll fire these employees and not improve their processes. These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
- grotorea 2y ago
  The optimistic view is that they will decide to capture this market and just let people pay a fee for a human review of their account.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    The problem is they have zero incentive to make for-fee service to be any better than the free service. What are you gonna do, turn to somebody else for the same service?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  It's hilariously apropos that employees are maximizing their revenue by solving a problem... that their employer created by maximizing its revenue (and underfunding support) Isn't modern big tech always saying that employees should shut up and focus on the numbers / delighting users?
  - vmfunction 2y ago
    With corporatism and capitalism, m maximizing revenue != maximizing benefit for customer and/or society Corporations' business model have not being long term sustainable, most of them have being off setting the hidden cost to environment, tax payers and general public for quite sometimes. Not event sure they can actually delighting users and make money at the same time.

JustLurking2022 2y ago

I'd like to think that but, hiring for a couple open roles posted only internally at a FAANG, I definitely received emails from external individuals inquiring about the role - and found out there's a whole cottage industry around referrals for a fee.

schmidt_fifty 2y ago

[dead]

CapeTheory 2y ago

"Move fast and break things" Wait, no, not like that

immibis 2y ago

Corporations are amoral. Anyone who doesn't want corporations to rule the world must also be prepared to be amoral when standing up to them.

Aeolun 2y ago

So it’s fine if you do it for free, but not if you take the same action for payment?

batch12 2y ago

It'd be too easy to catch the participating employees. Just would have to ask for help and watch logs to see who bites.

chinchilla2020 2y ago

This seems really really easy to honeypot for a security team at one of these companies

crooked-v 2y ago

How many of the bigcorps that are completely blind to user issues are even going to notice employees doing this?

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

Corruption? Huge monopolies companies suck at hearing their customers, so this is addressing a real need. Sounds like free market to me!