Professor Robert Kiltgaard said corruption = monopoly + discretion - transparency. He wrote this about political systems and bribery, but it also applies here.
Many tech companies have a monopoly on their market, infinite discretion, and zero transparency. It's a wonder nobody has thought of a "facilitating payments" startup sooner.
Everyone in the comments seems to think that this is a bad deal for the employees and that may be true at $500/unban. But imagine you're someone making $300k/year where all your accounts rely on 2fa codes sent to your email or you're someone with an social media-based business. You might pay a lot more than $500 to get your accounts back. And not everyone in Big Tech works in San Francisco. There's many people in low cost of living countries (e.g. Europe) that make half as much as Americans. Needless to say, people that earn less are more susceptible.
While I'm not condoning bribery, I'm surprised that the near-unanimous reaction of other commenters is that bribing employees of social media companies is infeasible. Historically speaking, any system without transparency where employees have discretion to do things that others assign monetary value have been corrupted.
Tech companies should take this more seriously, because once people are accustomed to making payments to get fair treatment from a decisionmaker, it becomes very difficult to change that behaviour.
https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2014/05/27/klitgaards-m...
Many tech companies have a monopoly on their market, infinite discretion, and zero transparency. It's a wonder nobody has thought of a "facilitating payments" startup sooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitating_payment
Everyone in the comments seems to think that this is a bad deal for the employees and that may be true at $500/unban. But imagine you're someone making $300k/year where all your accounts rely on 2fa codes sent to your email or you're someone with an social media-based business. You might pay a lot more than $500 to get your accounts back. And not everyone in Big Tech works in San Francisco. There's many people in low cost of living countries (e.g. Europe) that make half as much as Americans. Needless to say, people that earn less are more susceptible.
While I'm not condoning bribery, I'm surprised that the near-unanimous reaction of other commenters is that bribing employees of social media companies is infeasible. Historically speaking, any system without transparency where employees have discretion to do things that others assign monetary value have been corrupted.
Tech companies should take this more seriously, because once people are accustomed to making payments to get fair treatment from a decisionmaker, it becomes very difficult to change that behaviour.