> But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.

That would be a positive outcome.

The two-tier system is bullshit and creates a bubble that further insulates companies/employees from feedback about broken processes, because everyone in their social graph is exempt.

Far better they have to deal with friends telling them how bad the public appeal process is.

The official form isn't the real mechanism though. The real mechanism is that somebody in the company is in charge of that system, the general public has no access to that person, but someone inside the company can find them in the company directory and bend their ear. That's the case whether there is an official form or not.

> But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.

That feels like a good outcome to me. "I know a guy" should not be a reason to get preferential treatment. As much as I'm sure it absolutely sucks to lose an account on most of these services, I'd rather they stay lost for everyone, rather than get reinstated for people who happen to have connections.

The thing is that this preferential treatment should be the default - people should be able to get their accounts looked at, but as always there are hold-ups and moderator shortages and whatnot that drag waiting times closer to infinity. It's not like everyone else is guaranteed to be banned indefinitely - it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself. As long as it's not done at the expense of everyone else, I don't care much for it.

> it's more akin to pulling your friends out of the line and helping them yourself

I.e. a practice universally frowned upon?

The problem is everyone else is guaranteed to be banned indefinitely.

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.

> No company is going to fire you because you were trying to help.

This absolutely happens. As an example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-fired-stop-kidnapping/

"You were employed by The Home Depot until June 19, 2017 when you were fired because you assisted the police in preventing a kidnapping."

> "Our leadership team wasn't aware of the termination when it occurred. Once they found out and looked at the circumstances, they quickly reversed the decision."

So yes, they got fired, but it was a mistake. Certainly drawing attention to yourself may attract more mistakes than blending in, but it works out in the end. (The difference, probably, is that FAANG employees have a little more breathing room than Home Depot employees after not getting a week's worth of pay.)

Come to think of it, a friend of mine got mistakenly fired recently. They totaled her vacation hours wrong, saw that it was over some limit, and just fired her on the spot. I told her to call HR and appeal and they admitted the mistake and rehired her. She then got a higher paying job at a competitor since she was free for interviews for a couple days. So... it happens all the time.

If someone is being kidnapped and you can help safely, take the chance!

This is tangential, but quoting the Snopes story:

> according to Reagan, he was at work on 12 May 2017 when a co-worker told him he saw a man attack a woman in the parking lot. Reagan said he heard the woman scream: "Somebody help me, he's kidnapping my kid, he's stealing my kid!" Reagan told us he then contacted police, who instructed him to follow the man as he left the store area: "They said, don't touch him, don't engage with him, but keep an eye on him. Let us know where he is going so we know where to go when we get there."

> Reagan said that after returning to the store he was scolded by a supervisor and was fired four weeks later.

Physical intervention didn't occur.

>Being told not to physically intervene in a dangerous situation and then being fired when you disobey company policy is unsurprising.

when the situation involves the police, I'd imagine the situation is different. Hence why he was reinstated after blowback. This isn't an employee tackling a violent customer (which should be allowed, but I digress).

If "leadership" gave no reason for the termination or simply said "you left the campus on company hours (outside of break)", they would have been slightly more in the clear (unless the employee sued, of course. That would have been an interesting lawsuit).

I think it's the getting paid to do it part that will get people fired.

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.

The thing is, how would the companies know you're paid to do this, instead of perhaps just being an overzealous employee? Not like this service is going to disclose who is working for them...right?

I imagine it becomes obvious if you file 1000 of these a month, not to mention probably many of the people wanting this service were blocked legitly, so its more likely bad requests will be filed.

Not to mention it is like any crime - not like murders intentionally get caught either, but they still do.

> Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted

I don't know why you think people who deserve to be suspended would be reinstated. You act as if these people have no agency or discretion as to what accounts to reinstate.

They would be at first.

"Personally knows an employee of the company" is a strong signal that a person is not a bot, and may be more likely to be a decent person, because they are capable of maintaining enough of a relationship with an employee that the employee is willing to do something for them. The employee has already been vetted as trustworthy.

So that signal will apply to the first few people applying through this service.

Then some employees will get fired, the signal/noise ratio of internal requests changes, and employees can no longer get accounts reinstated via internal forms like this.

Basically this service will cause a brief spike in illegitimate accounts being reactivated, and then we will arrive at a new status quo that is strictly worse than the current one.

Sounds like a safe assumption. The only realistic assumption, really.

Why would that be the case?

The existing problem is that moderators aren't given enough time to investigate whether suspensions are legitimate, so there are enormous false positives. You can't expect much accuracy out of a decision made under excessive time pressure.

If someone is instead receiving e.g. hundreds of dollars, they can spend more time to get it right. Meanwhile getting it wrong could get them in trouble at work, so they have the incentive to be careful.

Companies could do this themselves -- charge a fee for appeals -- except that it would be bad PR to make innocent people pay a non-trivial sum of money to fix the company's mistake.

This would give the company a way to launder the fee through a third party while still reducing their other PR problem when they ruin peoples' lives through false positives.

Could you give an example of a large system that has ample opportunity for easy abuse, but does not have widespread abuse?

If not, why do you think this will be the first one?

Because there's a monetary incentive.

So? Monetary incentives lifted more people out of poverty than any prior system. There is also reputational risk for being stupid and which would get them shut down.

Perhaps not a joke, but in terms of how arbitrary social media banning is, I would consider this site a sign of "the times".

I guess it depends on what percentage of account suspensions are due to actual bad behavior on the part of the user and what percentage are false positives. My wild guess is the vast majority of account suspensions at a BigTech company are false positives of an overly-aggressive algorithm, so having an insider reactivate accounts is going to be a net-positive, even if a few actual bad accounts are reactivated.