Good news for Facebook users, with Meta announcing that it’s building a new customer-service division, which will provide direct advice and assistance in order to help Facebook and Instagram users resolve account issues and concerns more quickly.
As reported by Bloomberg:
“The effort is in the early stages, and has taken on a higher priority thanks to feedback Meta has gotten from the Oversight Board, the independent body set up in 2020 by the company to review some of its decisions on questionable or problematic content. The board has received more than a million appeals from users, many of them related to account support.”
A dedicated customer service element has been a much-requested feature, with many users expressing their frustration at not being able to contact anyone at the company for key concerns, like account suspensions, content removals, ad issues, etc.
Meta does provide some avenues for support, via its Help forums, and there are some contact points for advertisers as well. But getting a person from the company on the line, either by phone or live chat, is a difficult proposition, with no direct pointers on how, exactly, to go about connecting with Meta’s team.
That’s largely by design. When you’re operating a platform used by 3 billion people, it’s virtually impossible to cater to every individual’s request for help, while as you can imagine, many such queries are also time-wasting, illogical, impossible requests that no one would be able to cater to.
But over the last year, Meta has been working on potential solutions, which has seen the establishment of new live chat elements for English-speaking creators in the United States, as well as its Meta Pro Team project, which provides complimentary live support for Facebook and Instagram marketers to help them address various queries.
As Bloomberg notes, adding more human support has been a repeated recommendation from its Oversight Board, which has called on Meta to provide more avenues for appeal, in order to eliminate misinterpretations, and correct AI moderation errors.
Many cases that have been referred to the Board could have been avoided by incorporating human review, and while Meta’s scale does make this difficult, providing more immediate response could have major benefits, for many aspects.
Which, again, will be welcome news for many. Meta’s still working through the details, but eventually, users will have a new way to appeal moderation decisions, and ideally, a faster track to correcting errors in detection and enforcement.
We’ll keep you updated on the details.
