While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.

Better than just not having an agenda, they're going to personally vet the requests like their paycheck depends on it.

My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.

The hardest part (authenticating the request) is also done.

I'm glad people are helped. Something is better than nothing.

I also think that, a service that is focused on helping those with personal connections to Facebook employees dampens the most potent source of visible friction for the maintainers of a system that clearly has the potential to be arbitrary and oppressive.

I think we would all be better off in a world where each oops case was solved by changing the overall system - even if we also recognize that change on that scale is difficult for then the most well intentioned.

Yeah, from my time working at FB, it's basically a customer support queue that actually gets reviewed. Sometimes, there can be some additional discussion between the person looking at the ticket and the employee who reported it, so that clarifications can be made when needed. From what I saw, it's mostly used for account recovery, but sometimes used for bug reporting. FWIW, Yahoo had a similar escalation path while I was there (that seems to still exist).

This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.