Dear Meta: Please Let Me Speak to a Person

By Daniella Mini

Is anyone out there?

Can anyone hear me?

I feel like the Titanic’s crew member calling in the dark from his rowboat, frantically trying to locate a live person in the ice-cold North Atlantic Ocean.

Unlike him, I’m not looking for the unlikely survivor of a doomed transatlantic voyage. No, I’m simply trying to reach a live human at Meta, from among the roughly 78,000 live humans it employs, because I need to solve an issue with my Facebook page resulting from a freakin’ scam.

You’d think this wouldn’t be so hard for a company valued at 1.7 trillion dollars whose stated mission reads:

Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Human connection. That’s exactly what I need from Meta. A connection with a human.

As mind-bending as the power of AI may be, I would like Mark Zuckerberg and every last Meta employee to know that not every issue faced by the platform’s millions of users can be sorted out by an AI chatbot. I know this because I’ve spent hours with a perennially polite and positive bot that ends every exchange with the offer: Is there anything else I can help you with?

“Well, yes!” I want to answer my friendly Chatbot, “You can help me by connecting me to a real human! Don’t take this the wrong way. I know you’d like nothing more than to help me, but you simply can’t. Every potential solution you have offered has been a dead end. One dead end after another. It’s not your fault really. You weren’t programmed by the brilliant AI experts who created you to secure the attention of a real person, which is what I need at this point.”

Here’s my issue, in a nutshell, in case you, Dear Reader, may know how to solve it or can connect me to an elusive Meta human:

A scammer tricked me into creating what’s known as a Business Portfolio. No, he didn’t put a gun to my head. He fooled me because I was stupidly naive and full of it and wanted to believe the scammer worked for a well-known personal growth influencer who was interested in interviewing silly, arrogant me!

A Business Portfolio allows an entity to bring Meta assets (stuff like Instagram Accounts and Facebook Pages) together so they can be managed from one place. Well, as a result of the scam, a fraudulent Business Portfolio now owns my Page and won’t release it.

The well-meaning Chatbot has given me step-by-step instructions on how to submit what’s known as a Page Ownership Dispute. Basically, I need to gather and submit documentation to prove the page is mine. I’ve compiled what’s required, but I’m unable to submit it because the button the Chatbot says I should click does not exist on my portal. It’s not that I’m missing it. It’s just not there. The bot has told me as much.

Meanwhile, some scammer owns my page, and my content monetization has been suspended because I cannot confirm my payout account.

At this point, I sometimes wish my scammer would blackmail me: “Pay up and I’ll release your Page” sounds like a swell proposition to me.

I’m frustrated. Incredibly frustrated.

I feel as if I’m being punished, that it’s all bad karma for making fun of my mother—berating her even—because she’s technologically illiterate, because she’s a person who does not want to, and is not able to, do ANYTHING online.

I’m also beginning to think dark thoughts.

I finally decided to pay up to become Meta Verified as the subscription offered Enhanced Support, meaning I’d get to chat or email with a real human agent. Turns out I must first type in my problem into the support field and the AI decides where to send me. Well, it keeps sending me to the same old, same old AI Help Center to communicate with a chatbot, no matter how I describe my situation.

This is hopeless.

Could the bots be in on what’s going on because they don’t want to be replaced by humans and cease to exist, be out of a job?