> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support.
Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call.
ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own the typo squat `facrbook.com`. I feel like it's the same principle, though I assume toll free numbers are more expensive.
It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.
> Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call.
Contrast with Experian, which has a number for consumers to call, but actually has an elaborate infinite loop in its phone tree that prevents you from actually talking to a human (this is by design).
If you're one of their customers (read: a business paying for their service), there's support you can call, but for individuals who have issues with their online Experian account or credit report, you can't, even if you're a paid subscriber to their consumer-oriented credit reporting services.
>Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers.
Frankly it's absurd to me that it's legal to do so. Any public facing company that is sufficiently large should be required by law to operate a phone service where you can talk to a real human being.
All of these huge mega corps are run with absolute impunity and there is often absolutely 0 avenue for regular everyday people to get in touch when they have issues. They direct you in these endless loops to FAQ's and "Community Resources"; even getting an email address is like getting blood from stone sometimes.
My wife and most of her friends have all lost their original accounts.
She got an email that password was changed. We immediately took action. They had changed the email associated with account. No way to change it back.
Only thing we could accomplish was getting the account disabled.
Zero way to contact Facebook. These are all woman that FB was primary storage place for kids photos.
“There is a phone number for Meta online. When CBC called it, an automated recording said, ‘Please note that we are unable to provide telephone support at this time,’ and directed callers to meta.com/help.”
This one is pretty bad. This guy found a fake Facebook customer support phone number in a Google search, then asked the Meta AI chat in Facebook Messenger if the number he found was a real Facebook help line... and Meta AI said that it was. There's a screenshot of the chat in the article.
The bad thing is that people still think LLMs can be trusted at all. Companies integrating them into their offerings are not helping the public adopt the correct mental framing of these tools as "plausible text generators".
This reminds me of that recent issue with a Canadian airline, where (IIRC) a court ruled that their chatbot made a wrong, but binding, commitment to a customer.
I'm curious if a Canadian court would hold Meta liable for the man's losses in this case as well.
We're going to see a lot more SEO scams coming from social media platforms now that Google is promoting places like reddit and quora. Even on rSEO you can see moderators there asking themselves questions from alt accounts subtly promoting themselves. It's dog shit scammers all the way down.
I mean that’s kind of on meta, as a customer I shouldn’t really have to care about the internals of the company. If a disgruntled employee lies to customers, that shouldn’t be the customers problem either. To me, that’s all just a statement by the company.
I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything.
This is the beginning of the post:
Ruhul Alom
Social Media Marketer at Social MediaAuthor has 2.9K answers and 1M answer views6mo
My dear !
Yes, 1-844-457-1420 is a valid Facebook support phone number. It is a toll-free number that is available 24/7. You can call this number to get help with a variety of Facebook issues, such as:
Resetting your password
Logging in to your account
Recovering a hacked account
[...]
I see a ton of this on Quora. Not just for Facebook, but for a lot of online banks and others. They have hundreds of accounts doing it.
Quora doesn't even pretend to police this kind of thing. Automated moderation might remove it, only after it has been reported. There's far, far too much of it for users to report all of it.
Nobody pays attention to it on Quora, but it's clear that it's out there to poison AI and search engines.
Bit tangential, but what the heck is it with scammers saying "dear" so much? Pretty much every pig butchering or social engineering attempt has had them repeatedly addressing me as "dear."
Again and again we see that LLMs are great for creative output and terrible for anything where correctness matters. You should only use it for the latter scenarios when generating answers is slow/hard/expensive, but verification of answers is quick/easy/cheap. Probabilistic and non-deterministic answers have their place, but these companies marketing them in products need to do a better job expressing the limitations.
It shows an amazing lack of understanding for what an LLM is, even from the people selling and implementing them. You're exactly right in that they are terrible if correctness matters, but that should be obvious. If they where 100% correct, the size of the models would be much larger, as they'd need to retain all the original training data.
You can use the LLMs for language understand and interpreting questions, but the would need access to databases containing authoritative answers and not answer anything for which they don't have an answer.
An older client got scammed by a fake Amazon-Hotline. They bought a XBox-gift-card while on his PC via Teamviewer, till he pulled the power cored.
He then called me and I tried to find the official Amazon-Hotline on amazon.de. Since I was unable to find it I had to asked a search engine. The only results where third-party sites. It where from journalistic magazines I recognize (like chip.de) but still yet another gamble.
When I worked on a customer facing chatbot at my previous employer, we specifically wrote in the prompt "our customer service is not reachable by phone", and we tested that the chatbot was able to use that information and respond appropriately.
But I guess you can't expect a tiny startup like Facebook to invest money into having 1 employee part-time tweaking the prompt of the chatbot to respond appropriately to commonly recurring user questions.
Yes, AI in its current form is going to be a problem. I'm sure we haven't heard the worst yet. An AI may eventually kill a user.
I believe the heart of the problem is that corporations are riding a hype wave as long as they can, and an AI chat looks like super convincing, next level stuff thanks to the simple interface that hides the fact that you cannot communicate with this one as you would with a human being. You use natural language and it responds with natural language, which makes it not only convenient, but also dangerous.
There's money to gain on all this. While at the same time, hallucinations are an unsolved problem as well as making AI humble enough to realize and tell users that they just don't know. The combination of hallucinating, raising convincing arguments, being confidently incorrect, and not knowing the boundaries of your knowledge base, is a terrible one to let loose as officially sanctioned products.
One of the things about LLM-based AI that concerns me the most is realizing that the average person doesn’t understand that they hallucinate (or even what hallucination is).
I was listening to a debate on a podcast a while ago and one of the debaters kept saying, “Well, according to ChatGPT, […]”—it was incredibly difficult listening to her repeatedly use ChatGPT as her source. It was obvious she genuinely believed ChatGPT was reliable, and frankly, I don’t blame her, because when LLM’s hallucinate, they do so confidently.
>The woman [from fake tech support] said she would clear the hackers out, but he had to give her access to his phone through an app she had him download.
My 89 yr old data called "AMEX" and was scammed. He googled the number for AMEX and took the top result (he says, I did not witness this). I'm across the country, so that zoom session was quite tedious (it took us an hour to get the permissions straightened out for zoom to be able to share his screen).
Google has, for a long while now, let scammers just buy advertisements to get their fake scam page to the top of the results. And not just major banks, various open source software have been subject to this exact attack.
It's imperative for security that you install adblockers on all their devices.
I'm terrified of this happening to my elderly parents. It's why, even though it can be time consuming, I always have them run "tech support" issues (no matter how small) through me or my bro in law so some foreign scammer doesn't drain their accounts.
This is the real danger of AI, forget the “singularity” or any of that sci-fi crap. AI is going to destroy the average human’s already suffering reasoning ability.
The tolerance of society for social experiments, entrepreneurial and ai is something we consider allmende, but we are currently building up a solid "anti" sentiment against all of it, liberalism, disruptive technology and i can imagine a "Luddite" party like MAGA shutting it all down hard and fast in the future. I can already imagine some future bureaucracy, evaluating any business idea suggested for scam and harm potential and ending most of them before they even start. And this stuff right here is, where it was born. The prison holding your future self, it was planted right here.
Everything ever worth reading was written in the Pre-Collapse internet. So why not become a software-archeologist - digging for the golden past? Exhume it, get it back running, bring it all back, perfectly fine, software, books, games, our decadent ancestors abandoned and threw away to write off as rust. You too can help, rediscovering a past that worked better, untainted by AI, not yet riddled with Add-HD-Adds, when developers still had to be competent and companies still competed. Meet hot dig-site-teams near you- now. Join Past-Querries-Quary Inc. Can we dig it, yes we can!
This reminds me of the time I reported a fake PayPal email saying my account had been suspended to PayPal. The woman who answered the phone for PayPal told me very emphatically that I HAD BETTER HURRY UP AND DO EVERYTHING THEY TOLD ME TO!
I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't know how it is in any English-speaking country, but when I ask my Polish friends about the word "epistemology", they just don't know it.
According to Google: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
Even though they wouldn't know the term, we all learn how to figure out what's true and what's not: we learn it when watching cartoons about lying, or when interpreting texts in school and so on. But imagine you go to a doctor, and have a small talk in which you say "I was always fascinated by medicine", to which the doc responds "What is medicine?" - you probably would run away from that doctor.
And yet here we are, living in the "Information Era", and yet we're still missing the very basic techniques of figuring out the truth: if you look at the statistics of religion/atheism, no group holds over 50% of population - meaning THE MAJORITY IS WRONG - and not on a nuanced thing like the majority not being able to tell the average distance between the Earth and the Moon with 1 meter accuracy. No, on something as important and world-view defining as the existence and character of God, most of us are wrong.
The percentage of flat-earthers in America is a 2-digit number...
So the problem here isn't that Facebook doesn't have a support number. The problem is much deeper, and in a way, it's good that people suffer from their stupidity: it's like programmers suffering from errors - in the end of the day they end up with their logical thinking improved. Question is: how do we reshape the society to replace production errors with compilation errors, or how do we educate ourselves to minimize the frustrating error messages.
Not to apologize for the irresponsible deployment of this chatbot but it should be noted that the guy got the number from a Google search (think about the results you'd get for "facebook support number"). It's been a massive problem for at least the last 10 years.
I understand the downvotes and that it might be an unpopular position, but an empire built on stealing people's attention, through addiction, and one scientifically proven again and again to cause serious mental issues on vulnerable demographics (teens), deserves to be shamed.-
As a millenial, I'm more amazed that someone willingly uses a phone for non-mandatory and not-burningly-urgent phonecalls... why on earth would anyone do that is way beyond me.
I'm Gen-Z and talking to a human representative of a company makes me much more confident that something will happen as a result of my efforts (though still not certain).
I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.
As someone a little older I remember being able to talk to a person to get issues resolved fairly easily and reliably. The online help is great when the issue at hand is pretty cut and dry. It is nice for a non expert to be able to explain to support on the phone and just have things taken care of.
Support from days gone by was not perfect (hold times, support reading off a script)but it was often a nice option.
Not sure why throwing in the randomly assigned label of millennial, but fine, I also fall in the category and I've taken to just calling people and companies.
First of all, understand that many especially smaller companies have people who has the job of answering phone calls. Rather than doing a multi day back and forth via email or chat where you're one out of five that "agent" is currently servicing, calling is really really efficient. Clarification and confirmations are instant, alternatives can be quickly discuses. I call because it's efficient.
Also, have you ever noticed that most people SUCK at email? Try sending an email to company with two or more questions. What will happen is that you'll get an answer for the first question and then they forget about the rest. The larger the company the more likely this is to happen, because they can deal with three issues in one support ticket, at least that's my theory. So now you need three email.
I used to hate calling people, but I found that I hated uncertainty more and I hate getting wrong half answers to my questions. Calling people fixes all of this. Always call, but get confirmation in writing.
Fellow millennial, I also hate using the phone for anything, but very often a business provides no other interface to resolve my edge-case issue. Connecting to a human representative to discuss the situation ends up being the only way to resolve it. If they have a [solve my specific problem] button on their website, I'll use that, but often there is no such button.
AI has kind of fucked this, but for me (also millenial) I prefer to speak to real people because they are intelligent beings with roughly the same motivations as me and usually want to help out their fellow man.
For example, I can call a local store and ask "hi, do you have this item in stock, can you check on the shelf and set it aside for me please, I will be there in 25 mins".
By contrast stuff like "click and collect" order flows online are super rigid.
As a millennial I think voice calls sometimes are great. It obviously doesn't always work with big orgs like Facebook, but because so many people are now so afraid of or annoyed by just talking to a real person for a few minutes it's become a real power move to sometimes just go through the minor effort to make a call and expect some sort of immediacy to get things moving quickly. Email or text can be easily ignored and punted off (ex "whoops I didn't see it"), and increases the odds of miscommunication or having things be dragged out going back and forth.
maxbond|1 year ago
Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call.
ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own the typo squat `facrbook.com`. I feel like it's the same principle, though I assume toll free numbers are more expensive.
jessriedel|1 year ago
chimeracoder|1 year ago
Contrast with Experian, which has a number for consumers to call, but actually has an elaborate infinite loop in its phone tree that prevents you from actually talking to a human (this is by design).
If you're one of their customers (read: a business paying for their service), there's support you can call, but for individuals who have issues with their online Experian account or credit report, you can't, even if you're a paid subscriber to their consumer-oriented credit reporting services.
worble|1 year ago
Frankly it's absurd to me that it's legal to do so. Any public facing company that is sufficiently large should be required by law to operate a phone service where you can talk to a real human being.
All of these huge mega corps are run with absolute impunity and there is often absolutely 0 avenue for regular everyday people to get in touch when they have issues. They direct you in these endless loops to FAQ's and "Community Resources"; even getting an email address is like getting blood from stone sometimes.
nullserver|1 year ago
throwaway48476|1 year ago
Thadawan|1 year ago
simonw|1 year ago
idle_zealot|1 year ago
CoastalCoder|1 year ago
I'm curious if a Canadian court would hold Meta liable for the man's losses in this case as well.
throwaway48476|1 year ago
p3rls|1 year ago
echoangle|1 year ago
naveen99|1 year ago
_cs2017_|1 year ago
I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything.
This is the beginning of the post:
ceejayoz|1 year ago
StackOverflow gets lots of fake posts like this promoting numbers. Around tax time there's a lot of Quicken ones.
jfengel|1 year ago
Quora doesn't even pretend to police this kind of thing. Automated moderation might remove it, only after it has been reported. There's far, far too much of it for users to report all of it.
Nobody pays attention to it on Quora, but it's clear that it's out there to poison AI and search engines.
JohnMakin|1 year ago
bilalq|1 year ago
mrweasel|1 year ago
You can use the LLMs for language understand and interpreting questions, but the would need access to databases containing authoritative answers and not answer anything for which they don't have an answer.
noAnswer|1 year ago
He then called me and I tried to find the official Amazon-Hotline on amazon.de. Since I was unable to find it I had to asked a search engine. The only results where third-party sites. It where from journalistic magazines I recognize (like chip.de) but still yet another gamble.
baobabKoodaa|1 year ago
But I guess you can't expect a tiny startup like Facebook to invest money into having 1 employee part-time tweaking the prompt of the chatbot to respond appropriately to commonly recurring user questions.
resoluteteeth|1 year ago
croes|1 year ago
After SEO we'll get AIO.
Same with prompt injection by malware.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
jug|1 year ago
I believe the heart of the problem is that corporations are riding a hype wave as long as they can, and an AI chat looks like super convincing, next level stuff thanks to the simple interface that hides the fact that you cannot communicate with this one as you would with a human being. You use natural language and it responds with natural language, which makes it not only convenient, but also dangerous.
There's money to gain on all this. While at the same time, hallucinations are an unsolved problem as well as making AI humble enough to realize and tell users that they just don't know. The combination of hallucinating, raising convincing arguments, being confidently incorrect, and not knowing the boundaries of your knowledge base, is a terrible one to let loose as officially sanctioned products.
jay-barronville|1 year ago
I was listening to a debate on a podcast a while ago and one of the debaters kept saying, “Well, according to ChatGPT, […]”—it was incredibly difficult listening to her repeatedly use ChatGPT as her source. It was obvious she genuinely believed ChatGPT was reliable, and frankly, I don’t blame her, because when LLM’s hallucinate, they do so confidently.
chrisjj|1 year ago
hnuser0000|1 year ago
sdflhasjd|1 year ago
e40|1 year ago
ADeerAppeared|1 year ago
He's speaking the truth.
Google has, for a long while now, let scammers just buy advertisements to get their fake scam page to the top of the results. And not just major banks, various open source software have been subject to this exact attack.
It's imperative for security that you install adblockers on all their devices.
Magi604|1 year ago
bitnasty|1 year ago
ItCouldBeWorse|1 year ago
_____________________________________________________
Everything ever worth reading was written in the Pre-Collapse internet. So why not become a software-archeologist - digging for the golden past? Exhume it, get it back running, bring it all back, perfectly fine, software, books, games, our decadent ancestors abandoned and threw away to write off as rust. You too can help, rediscovering a past that worked better, untainted by AI, not yet riddled with Add-HD-Adds, when developers still had to be competent and companies still competed. Meet hot dig-site-teams near you- now. Join Past-Querries-Quary Inc. Can we dig it, yes we can!
RecycledEle|1 year ago
CrazyStat|1 year ago
29athrowaway|1 year ago
jhawleypeters|1 year ago
nojvek|1 year ago
cmcconomy|1 year ago
lupire|1 year ago
noman-land|1 year ago
Etherlord87|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
According to Google: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
Even though they wouldn't know the term, we all learn how to figure out what's true and what's not: we learn it when watching cartoons about lying, or when interpreting texts in school and so on. But imagine you go to a doctor, and have a small talk in which you say "I was always fascinated by medicine", to which the doc responds "What is medicine?" - you probably would run away from that doctor.
And yet here we are, living in the "Information Era", and yet we're still missing the very basic techniques of figuring out the truth: if you look at the statistics of religion/atheism, no group holds over 50% of population - meaning THE MAJORITY IS WRONG - and not on a nuanced thing like the majority not being able to tell the average distance between the Earth and the Moon with 1 meter accuracy. No, on something as important and world-view defining as the existence and character of God, most of us are wrong.
The percentage of flat-earthers in America is a 2-digit number...
So the problem here isn't that Facebook doesn't have a support number. The problem is much deeper, and in a way, it's good that people suffer from their stupidity: it's like programmers suffering from errors - in the end of the day they end up with their logical thinking improved. Question is: how do we reshape the society to replace production errors with compilation errors, or how do we educate ourselves to minimize the frustrating error messages.
finack|1 year ago
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|1 year ago
davidjnr0987|1 year ago
[deleted]
DueDilligence|1 year ago
[deleted]
Bluestein|1 year ago
Bluestein|1 year ago
fckgw|1 year ago
not_your_vase|1 year ago
happypumpkin|1 year ago
I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.
tocs3|1 year ago
Support from days gone by was not perfect (hold times, support reading off a script)but it was often a nice option.
mrweasel|1 year ago
First of all, understand that many especially smaller companies have people who has the job of answering phone calls. Rather than doing a multi day back and forth via email or chat where you're one out of five that "agent" is currently servicing, calling is really really efficient. Clarification and confirmations are instant, alternatives can be quickly discuses. I call because it's efficient.
Also, have you ever noticed that most people SUCK at email? Try sending an email to company with two or more questions. What will happen is that you'll get an answer for the first question and then they forget about the rest. The larger the company the more likely this is to happen, because they can deal with three issues in one support ticket, at least that's my theory. So now you need three email.
I used to hate calling people, but I found that I hated uncertainty more and I hate getting wrong half answers to my questions. Calling people fixes all of this. Always call, but get confirmation in writing.
mitthrowaway2|1 year ago
throwaway22032|1 year ago
For example, I can call a local store and ask "hi, do you have this item in stock, can you check on the shelf and set it aside for me please, I will be there in 25 mins".
By contrast stuff like "click and collect" order flows online are super rigid.
erremerre|1 year ago
I do not mind a phone call when I am the one initiating and hence, I know the context of it and the expectations.
lepus|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]