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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this. Why not pay an employee to take a few hours, ask a person from the necessary team to take a look, then call or write the complainant?

That -has- to be cheaper than getting all these lawyers involved over what was probably, as the article states, a glitch of some sort.

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Once "legal" starts looking at it, it's in their hands, everyone except them and the executive team better step aside.

> In court, Soldati said Facebook attorneys were condescending and patronizing to him, but he took it seriously because it was his livelihood and because he thought that someone needed to fight them. He says it was “100%” worth it.

Condescending and patronizing sounds about right. "We went to Yale and Harvard, and now work for Meta, no puny coffee shop owner is going to oppose us! This should be a walk in the park". It's pretty glorious how they lost.

I’ve worked for the same Fortune 500 company for 20+ years. 99% of the time I have zero idea what team does what and whom I would even talk to find out. With nearly 100,000 employees and I have no idea how many thousands of departments and teams, I don’t think anyone really has the big picture of what everyone is doing.

It sounds like there's a job for people who knows the bird eye's view as well as the ground truth of an organization.

Thats crazy talk, what would such a role even be called?

They used to be called Architects, but over time that name came to be associated with losing track of the ground truth.

Easy mistake to make, but architects design building.

If it were like a military thing. They'd likely be an officer, maybe even a chief of some kind.

I’m just imagining going up to somebody in the c-suite and telling them what team I work for and what I do. I guarantee they would have no idea we exist. I once sat next to the manager who is three levels above me at a lunch meeting. She had zero idea who my team was or what we did.

I'm sure it would be very similar for many generals.

I think Leo de Moura was at Microsoft at the time when he was developing the Lean proof assistant. He once commented that he was fairly sure the CEO did not know the language existed or that it was being developed within MS. I found that pretty funny, and probably entirely accurate!

Probably not what you are looking for, but … management? In old school firms most managers have followed a career path over different departments, learning the ropes and multiple aspects of the business and often company, building a network while growing as a person and in scale/scope. They are supposed to be able to build bridges and transcend the petty politics between teams in order to get things moving.

I assume lots of glitches occur (after all they "move fast and break things") and feel if they engage with one they'll be required to engage with others. While if they just spend the effort to stonewall the few who complain they'll save money in the long run. They have billions of accounts, so what's a few to them?

That’s assuming you can even contact the necessary team. Usually your only recourse with FB is clicking through a support wizard and filling out a textbox. Then you get a final, unappealable judgement from an admin as a notification.

I'm reading as why did Meta not pay its employees internally to resolve this matter instead of paying attorneys to litigate this case. The assumption being that an employee is already on the payroll so just give them an assignment instead of giving money to lawyers.

I'm guessing their arrogance told them they'd never lose the case and it would be worth it to set precedence. Only it might have backfired

Ah, I think your reading is more correct. Thanks for clarifying :)

Because Meta’s support system is entirely run by automation. By bots. There’s no human. No one knew, no one noticed, no one cared.

Once served with a lawsuit, most companies don't continue to rely on their publicly accessible support system.

Exactly, in comes through a separate channel (lawyers) and then actually is dealt with.

such a cop out answer. someone wrote that bot. someone can investigate logs to see what the bot did. some PM is in charge of the people that wrote the bots. their bonuses are dependent on good reviews. anyone writing automation that doesn't leave a trail to follow wouldn't be worth much. no logging is an amateur move or the move of a guilty party. hopefully, the next case will have lawyers instead of some small shop owner fighting for their life. the lawyer might be able to convince a judge these logs need to be turned over.

all i'm seeing from the work this small business owner did with this case was to find where the loose string in the sweater is. we now just need the right people to start pulling on that string.

It's kafkaesque. This happens when part of a system cannot successfully communicate with another part of the system to resolve problems, whether that's unintentional or design.

I'd expect the legal team were employees, too.

They had to either fight the case, or figure out what team could actually sort this out and convince their manager to take a look.

In the unlikely event they managed the first of those tasks, the second would present an insurmountable hurdle.

> "I'd expect the legal team were employees, too."

The article actually says this:

> "Despite Facebook hiring several law firms to defend their case, Soldati, representing himself, was able to successfully argue Meta/Facebook committed a breach of contract and that they were not immune under the Communications Decency Act"

(edited out how I originally wrongly introduced this quote)

even when evilCorp has their own in house team of evilLawyers, they normally hire outside evilLawyers to handle the cases at trial. in house evilLawyers might not have court/trial experience, and the type of evilLawyer that likes court/trial tend to not like office evilLawyer work. also, in house evilLawyer might not be registered in the state of the trial.

Agreed, it seems like a disproportionate response.

Handling the situation quietly when the court case was filed might have avoided this bad-for-Meta legal precedent. Taking it to trial seems like the most risky move, I'm interested if anyone can see Meta's legal logic here.

Lawyers don't get paid if the issue is resolved internally by support teams.

That’s assuming Meta has support teams. I’ve yet to see evidence of that. I once had to solve a Facebook business page issue that went unanswered for a year, and the only way I got it moving was to send a legal threat to Meta on a lawyer’s letterhead. Ended up solving the problem with a couple weeks.

Did they assume they would win?

Because Meta has billions of users and they don’t have humans look at these cases. It’s all automated.

I lost my IG account multiple times due to using a VPN. I’m a normal user. Nothing malicious. Every support request is answered by only a robot.

Meta’s help support is a bot. Theres no human. You can’t reach a human. The only recourse you have is what this man did.

I initially read it the way you did, but OP means from Meta's side once they have received notice of legal action being initiated.

Big tech companies don't get big and stay big by hiring tons of humans to handle cases like these. Don't believe me? Try asking Google to fix a problem or Facebook or Twitter. (Apple is the exception, but they are much older and even they have issues)

It's not apples to apples. You need to pay an employee to take a few hours to handle one complaint, multiplied by number of complaints. And this is more expensive than paying lawyers a much smaller number of times.

if you consider the scale of Meta, being international and all, it probably is not. I'm sure they've run the numbers. Think in expected values, since most won't sue.

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