I feel this user’s pain. Obviously we don’t know of food action was warranted in this case. Sometimes it isn’t and there being no recourse is unacceptable. Knowing someone at the company, having a sufficient Twitter audience or relying on posts like this getting attention should not be how this is resolved.

Side note: I absolutely won’t use my Gmail account for any other Google service. It’s just too great a risk and it’s ridiculous that a developer ToS violation can also kill your Gmail access.

I see a fundamental mistake these companies make with automation: optimizing for the wrong metric.

The metric they seem to use is the number of cases handled by automated systems. What they should use is the number of cases their workers can deal with.

The difference is that the second one doesn’t reward false positives. There are some cases that need human review. You should even be able to pay for expedited review (ideally refunding you if the decision is made in error).

A good example of this is Tiktok’s reporting system. Like many such systems it’s clear that it just takes actions based on the number of reports. There is no penalty for fake reports. So people brigade creators they don’t like (typically politics and science) and those affected have to go appeals processes. It’s ridiculous.

Put another way: automation shouldn’t replace people. It should augment their effectiveness.