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https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas-customer- service-hotline-160224479.html

Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to
appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one
of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for
their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo's small claims
court.

Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.

Those may be extraordinary lengths to regain a digital profile with no
relation to its owner's livelihood, but Palena is one of a growing number
of frustrated users of Meta's services who, unable to get help from an
actual human through normal channels of recourse, are using the court
system instead. And in many cases, it's working.

Engadget spoke with five individuals who have sued Meta in small claims
court over the last two years in four different states. In three cases,
the plaintiffs were able to restore access to at least one lost account.
One person was also able to win financial damages and another reached a
cash settlement. Two cases were dismissed. In every case, the plaintiffs
were at least able to get the attention of Meta’s legal team, which
appears to have something of a playbook for handling these claims.

Why small claims?
At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary
volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts. The company’s official help pages steer users who have been
hacked toward confusing automated tools that often lead users to dead-end
links or emails that don’t work if your account information has been
changed. (The company recently launched a $14.99-per-month program, Meta Verified, which grants access to human customer support. Its track record
as a means of recovering hacked accounts after the fact has been spotty at best, according to anecdotal descriptions.)

Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney
General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf —
on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across
the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked
Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the
customer service representatives of your company,” a coalition of 41 state
AGs wrote in a letter to the company earlier this year.

Facebook and Instagram users have long sought creative and sometimes
extreme measures to get hacked accounts back due to Meta’s lack of
customer support features. Some users have resorted to hiring their own
hackers or buying an Oculus headset since Meta has dedicated support staff
for the device (users on Reddit report this “method” no longer works). The small claims approach has become a popular topic on Reddit forums where frustrated Meta users trade advice on various “methods” for getting an
account back. People Clerk, a site that helps people write demand letters
and other paperwork required for small claims court, published a help
article called “How to Sue facebook,” in March.

It’s difficult to estimate just how many small claims cases are being
brought by Facebook and Instagram users, but they may be on the rise.
Patrick Forrest, the chief legal officer for Justice Direct, the legal
services startup that owns People Clerk, says the company has seen a “significant increase” in cases against Meta over the last couple years.

One of the advantages of small claims court is that it’s much more
accessible to people without deep pockets and legal training. Filing fees
are typically under $100 and many courthouses have resources to help
people complete the necessary paperwork for a case. “There's no discovery, there are no depositions, there's no pre-trial,” says Bruce Zucker, a law professor at California State University, Northridge. “You get a court
date and it's going to be about a five or 10 minute hearing, and you have
a judge who's probably also tried to call customer service and gotten
nowhere.”

The stakes
“Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp [have] become crucial marketplaces
where people conduct their business, where people are earning a living," Forrest said. “And if you are locked out of that account, business or
personal, it can lead to severe financial damages, and it can disrupt your ability to sustain your livelihood.”

One such person whose finances were enmeshed with Meta's products is
Valerie Garza, the owner of a massage business. She successfully sued the company in a San Diego small claims court in 2022 after a hack which cost
her access to personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as those associated with her business. She was able to document thousands of
dollars in resulting losses.

A Meta legal representative contacted Garza a few weeks before her small
claims court hearing, requesting she drop the case. She declined, and when
Meta didn’t show up to her hearing, she won by default. "When we went
through all of the loss of revenues," Garza told Engadget, "[the judge]
kind of had to give it to me.”

But that wasn’t the end of Garza’s legal dispute with Meta. After the
first hearing, the company filed a motion asking the judge to set aside
the verdict, citing its own failure to appear at the hearing. Meta also
tried to argue that its terms of service set a maximum of $100 liability. Another hearing was scheduled and a lawyer again contacted Garza offering
to help get her account back.

“He seemed to actually kind of just want to get things turned back on, and
that was still my goal, at this point,” Garza said. It was then she
discovered that her business’ Instagram was being used to advertise sex
work.

She began collecting screenshots of the activity on the account, which
violated Instagram’s terms of service, as well as fraudulent charges for Facebook ads bought by whoever hacked her account. Once again, Meta didn’t
show up to the hearing and a judge ordered the company to pay her the
$7,268.65 in damages she had requested.

“I thought they were going to show up this time because they sent their exhibits, they didn't ask for a postponement or anything,” she says. “My
guess is they didn't want to go on record and have a transcript showing
how completely grossly negligent they are in their business and how very
little they care about the safety or financial security of their paying advertisers.”

In July of 2023, Garza indicated in court documents that Meta had paid in
full. In all, the process took more than a year, three court appearances
and countless hours of work. But Garza says it was worth it. “I just can't stand letting somebody take advantage and walking away,” she says.

Even for individuals whose work doesn't depend on Meta's platforms, a
hacked account can result in real harm.

Palena, who flew cross-country to challenge Meta in court, had no
financial stake in his Facebook account, which he claimed nearly 20 years
ago when the social network was still limited to college students. But
whoever hacked him had changed the associated email address and phone
number, and began using his page to run scam listings on Facebook
Marketplace.

“I was more concerned about the damage it could do to me and my name if something did happen, if someone actually was scammed,” he tells Engadget.
In his court filing, he asked for $10,000 in damages, the maximum allowed
in California small claims court. He wrote that Meta had violated its own
terms of service by allowing a hacked account to stay up, damaging his reputation. “I didn't really care that much about financial compensation,” Palena says “I really just wanted the account back because the person who hacked the account was still using it. They were using my profile with my
name and my profile image."

A couple weeks later, a legal rep from Meta reached out to him and asked
him for information about his account. They exchanged a few emails over
several weeks, but his account was still inaccessible. The same day he
boarded a plane to San Mateo, the Meta representative emailed him again
and asked if he would be willing to drop the case since “the access team
is close to getting your account secure and activated again.” He replied
that he intended to be in court the next day as he was still unable to get
into his account.

Less than half an hour before his hearing was scheduled to start, he
received the email he had spent months waiting for: a password reset link
to get back into his account. Palena still attended the hearing, though
Meta did not. According to court records reviewed by Engadget, Palena told
the judge the case had been “tentatively resolved,” though he hasn’t
officially dropped the case yet.

The hurdles of small claims
While filing a small claims court case is comparatively simple, it can
still be a minefield, even to figure out something as seemingly
straightforward as which court to file to. Forrest notes that Facebook’s
terms of service stipulates that legal cases must be brought in San Mateo County, home of Meta’s headquarters. But, confusingly, the terms of
service for Meta accounts states that cases other than small claims court
must be filed in San Mateo. In spite of the apparent contradiction, some
people (like Garza) have had success suing Meta outside of San Mateo.

Each jurisdiction also has different rules for maximum allowable
compensation in small claims, what sorts of relief those courts are able
to grant and even whether or not parties are allowed to have a lawyer
present. The low barrier to entry means many first-time plaintiffs are navigating the legal system for the first time without help, and making
rookie mistakes along the way.

Shaun Freeman had spent years building up two Instagram accounts, which he describes as similar to TMZ but with “a little more character.” The pages, which had hundreds of thousands of followers, had also been a significant source of income to Freeman, who has also worked in the entertainment
industry and uses the stage name Young Platinum.

He says his pages had been suspended or disabled in the past, but he was
able to get them back through Meta’s appeals process, and once through a complaint to the California Attorney General’s office. But in 2023 he
again lost access to both accounts. He says one was disabled and one is inaccessible due to what seems like a technical glitch.

He tried to file appeals and even asked a friend of a friend who worked at
Meta to look into what had happened, but was unsuccessful. Apparently out
of other options, he filed a small claims case in Nevada in February. A
hearing was scheduled for May, but Freeman had trouble figuring out the
legal mechanics. “It took me months and months to figure out how to get
them served,” Freeman says. He was eventually able to hire a process
server and got the necessary signature 10 days before his hearing. But it
may have been too late. Court records show the case was dismissed for
failure to serve.

Even without operator error, Meta seems content to create hardship for
would-be litigants over matters much smaller than the company's more headline-grabbing antitrust and child safety disputes. Based on
correspondence reviewed by Engadget, the company maintains a separate
"small claims docket" email address to contact would-be litigants.

Ron Gaul, who lives in North Dakota, filed a small claims suit after Meta disabled his account following a wave of what he describes as targeted harassment. The case was eventually dismissed after Meta’s lawyers had the
case moved to district court, which is permissible for a small claims case under North Dakota law.

Gaul says he couldn’t keep up with the motions filed by Meta’s lawyers,
whom he had hoped to avoid by filing in small claims court. “I went to
small claims because I couldn't have a lawyer,” he tells Engadget.

Ryan, an Arizona real estate agent who asked to be identified by his first
name only, decided to sue Meta in small claims with his partner after
their Facebook accounts were disabled in the fall of 2022. They were both admins of several large Facebook Groups and he says their accounts were disabled over a supposed copyright violation.

Before a scheduled hearing, the company reached out. “They started
basically trying to bully us,” says Ryan, who asked to be identified by
his first name only. “They started saying that they have a terms of
service [and] they can do whatever they want, they could delete people for
any reason.” Much like Gaul, Ryan expected small claims would level the
playing field. But according to emails and court records reviewed by
Engadget, Meta often deploys its own legal resources as well as outside
law firms to respond to these sorts of claims and engage with small claims litigants outside of court. "They put people that still have legal
training against these people that are, you know, representing
themselves,” he said.

In the end, Meta’s legal team was able to help Ryan get his account back
and he agreed to drop himself from the small claims case. But two months
later his partner had still not gotten back into hers. Meta eventually
told her that her account had been permanently deleted and was no longer
able to be restored. Meta eventually offered $3,500 — the maximum amount
for a small claims case in Arizona. He says they wanted more, but Meta
refused, and they felt like they were out of options. Ryan claims they had already lost tens of thousands of dollars in potential sales that they
normally sourced from Facebook. “We were prepared to go further, but no
lawyer would really take it on without a $15,000 retainer and it wasn't
worth it.”

While it may seem surprising that Meta would give these small claims cases
so much attention, Zucker, the Cal State Northridge professor, says that
big companies have their own reasons for wanting to avoid court. “I don’t
think places like Google or Meta want to have a bunch of judgments against
them … because then that becomes a public record and starts floating
around,” he says. “So they do take these things seriously.”

Without responding to specific questions about the substance of this
story, Meta instead sent Engadget the following statement:

"We know that losing and recovering access to your online accounts can be
a frustrating experience. We invest heavily in designing account security systems to help prevent account compromise in the first place, and in
educating our users, including by regularly sharing new security features
and tips for how people can stay safe and vigilant against potential
targeting by hackers. But we also know that bad actors, including
scammers, target people across the internet and constantly adapt to evade detection by social media platforms like ours, email and telecom
providers, banks and others. To detect malicious activity and help protect people who may have gotten compromised via email phishing, malware or
other means, we also constantly improve our detection, enforcement and
support systems, in addition to providing channels where people can report account access issues to us, working with law enforcement and taking legal action against malicious groups."


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We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.

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