Technology

Requiring Meta to have humans accessible in customer support will not solve any of the real problems at Meta. Unless Meta wants to hear from and meaningfully, helpfully respond to their data sources, it will do nothing but allow abusive people to abuse the humans in customer support. And if they want to hear and respond, they don't need a law to require them to do it. Nothing is stopping them from doing it, except their own priorities.

I just spent a month and many interactions with real humans at my electricity provider, which is a service much more important to health, safety and quality of life than anything Meta provides. The issue was one of safety and security of supply issue due to degraded equipment.

The humans in customer support were uniformly ignorant of technical requirements and business processes. Unable to answer basic questions about roles, responsibilities, timelines or even the possibility of getting anything done about the issues.

The only tool at their disposal was a job system in which they could create jobs. So they asked me what sort of jobs they should create. I don't know their business organization or processes, so I couldn't advise them. All the jobs they created were rejected due to being created incorrectly or inappropriately. Never with any feedback to me, of course. I had to call back and wait half an hour to an hour to speak to a human, each time I wanted an update. They didn't even have a means to escalate my call to someone with knowledge of the business processes or authority to do anything other than open more jobs. They couldn't re-open jobs that had been closed without any action taken or information provided. They couldn't open new jobs with any priority on the basis that weeks and multiple prior jobs had resulted in no useful response. They had no information about when a job might be dealt with: they could not articulate any commitment to response timelines.

It wasn't the fault of the humans in customer support, beyond their choosing to continue working in such a dysfunctional organization. It was the fault of the management that deliberately created the dysfunctional organization and business processes. But none of that management was available via customer support.

If Meta doesn't want to hear or respond to their data sources, they won't. It makes no difference if there are humans in support or not.

Fortunately, I was able to switch electricity providers.

Regulating trivial aspects of trivial services is not beneficial. It's just an additional increment of control for those in power, available to be abused for more wealth and power. And a precedent for yet more regulation.