Facebook is building a customer-service group to field content complaints

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is building a customer-service division to help users of its social networks who have had posts or accounts removed unexpectedly.

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.

“How do we provide care and customer service and responsiveness to people about why their content has been taken down or why their accounts are taken down?” said Brent Harris, Meta’s vice president of governance, who confirmed that improving Meta’s customer service is something they are “spending a bunch of time on.” He didn’t provide details on how the group would interact with users.

Meta, with more than 3 billion global users across social-media apps including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is notoriously poor at customer service. The issue has intensified as the company relies more heavily on artificial intelligence to make content moderation decisions, which sometimes leads to the mistaken automated removal of users’ accounts or posts with little explanation. Both regular users and small business advertisers often complain that there is almost no recourse for a locked, suspended or hacked account. The company offers automated tools to try to recover an account, but it’s difficult to make contact with a person who actually works at Meta. Users instead sometimes resort to messaging employees or journalists directly asking for help.