Does Meta Even Care When Its Users Get Hacked?
Lizzie O’Leary: Not too long ago, I got on the line with a woman I’d gone to college with. Her name’s Danielle.
Metta: Danielle Lafave. I am a smart animal veterinarian in the Vermont New Hampshire area. As of July, when we moved up here from Washington, D.C., and I’m a fellow, Williams allowed love.
Lizzie O’Leary: And we’re Instagram friends. Yeah, Please forgive my scratchy voice in this interview, by the way. I had a cold. What happened to you on Instagram? How did it start?
Metta: It started with a message that I got from an acquaintance when we were in Washington, D.C. We were really big into soccer and following D.C. United and the women’s team. And I got a message from a soccer friend that said something to the effect of, Hey, I’m starting a clothing line. Would you be interested?
Lizzie O’Leary: This friend was someone whose work overlapped with soccer. And it didn’t seem that unlikely that this was something he would do.
Metta: I mentioned it to my husband and he said, Oh, well, yeah, good for him. Cool. And it just it didn’t raise any red flags. It should have. But I had we had just been traveling. I was tired. I’ve got a toddler. And I was like, yeah, sure, put me on the list for, you know, whenever you launch your new platform and click the link. And that’s how it started.
Lizzie O’Leary: As you can probably guess, that friend was not starting a clothing business. He had been hacked and Danielle quickly realized she had been too. Danielle got an email from Metta telling her that the email account associated with her Instagram had been changed. But by then it was too late.
Metta: So I clicked on it and it just took me to General Instagram Help Center. There was nowhere for me to say, Hey, no, I am not authorizing this. That is not something that I requested. And it became pretty clear to me pretty quickly that I was going to be out of luck because every resource that I found online said time is of the essence. Well, this is something that pretty much happens in the evening. And then I went to bed. And so the hackers had hours and hours and hours to swap things over.
Lizzie O’Leary: Danielle tried logging in a few different ways. She even used an account she had for her dog to try to communicate with the hackers. At one point, they sent her a message on WhatsApp asking for money. She said no. She was incredibly frustrated, but also out of options.
Metta: And then I just decided after a few days that it just wasn’t worth the amount of energy that I was investing in my anger and my frustration and that I could still. Contact people if I needed to, and I could still find the resources that I needed to and that, you know, the actual adorable child himself was in front of me and maybe I should be paying attention to him instead of being mad that I had lost all my photos.
Lizzie O’Leary: I, of course, clicked on the link. Like a dum dum. Thinking that you were starting a clothing line. Oh, God.
Metta: Did you get it for me? Oh, no. I’m so sorry.
Lizzie O’Leary: No, Danielle, that. Well, I’m. She just moved. Maybe. Maybe she’s getting out of the veterinary business.
Metta: I didn’t know that you had gone through me.
Speaker 3: Oh, God. Oh, you.
Lizzie O’Leary: Know.
Lizzie O’Leary: I do realize the irony here. I host the tech show. I have covered many hacks and I did the thing you are not supposed to do. I clicked on the weird link. I also tried to get my account back to no avail for about 20 minutes. It was in this weird battle with the hackers where I would briefly log in and tried to change the settings and then they would get back in and do the same thing. Then they changed the email and the phone numbers associated with my account, changed my screen name and started DMing.
Lizzie O’Leary: Everyone I know about weird crypto schemes and also they told people I was starting a clothing line. They even used pictures of my kid when they posted stories and sent DMS. The whole thing would have been darkly funny. Except for that part that felt really invasive. There’s a key difference between me and Danielle because I am a journalist and because Slate has contacts at Meta, I was able to email them and get my account back.
Metta: It sucks, quite frankly, because the person is a friend of mine through whom I got hacked, had an inside connection at Met and got his account back. My cousin got hacked and she used to work on Capitol Hill, so she pulled a political string somehow and got her account back. So everyone’s gotten their account back by me. I think it sucks. I think my dad doesn’t care. It doesn’t. I can’t use the language. I’d like to use. The identity verification that I submitted a month ago was supposed to get processed in 72 hours. I’ve heard nothing. I wasn’t expecting to hear back because everyone on the internet says, Oh, yeah, no, don’t bother. You’re going to be stuck in purgatory forever. I think Maria just doesn’t care. They’re going to make money. And those of us who don’t have a connection don’t matter.
Lizzie O’Leary: So today on the show, if you lose your account on Facebook or Instagram, why is it so damn hard to get it back? I’m Lizzie O’Leary and you’re listening to what Next, TBD, a show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around. It turns out that I am not the only person wondering why it’s so hard to get an account back or even get a hold of someone to talk to. At Metta Kirstin Grind, who’s a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has been wondering the same thing.
Speaker 3: Well, it started more than a year ago. I wrote a story for the Journal about Facebook’s very confusing content moderation policies and how it was very hard for a user to figure out what what you’re allowed to say, what’s going to get you dinged, what’s going to get you in the so called Facebook jail. And after that story came out, I got the most voluminous amount of reader email I’ve ever gotten. And much of that was users saying they were having trouble with their accounts and they couldn’t reach anyone. MADDOW Couldn’t get their Instagram or Facebook accounts back. And I just kept getting so many emails that I decided to keep kind of pursuing this issue.
Speaker 3: And so earlier this year, I wrote kind of like a tongue in cheek story about the crazy lengths that people have to go through to try and reach someone who matter. And then after that story, I, of course, got more reader email and suddenly it sounded like maybe there were internal matter employees in on this issue. And so I’ve just kind of kept following these threads because, listen, I’m a user myself and I want to know what would happen if something happened with my account.
Lizzie O’Leary: Facebook has almost 3 billion active users, Instagram roughly 2 billion. And all of those users like love or maybe even depend on their accounts. Kirstin says that if you lose access to your account, your options are not so great.
Speaker 3: There’s really not much you can do. So you would think there would be a customer service email or a phone line or like at the very least a chat bot. There’s actually nothing. Facebook does provide some guidance online for forms that you’re supposed to fill out to get your account back. Now, I don’t have any numbers backing this up, but anecdotally I’ve heard that that often doesn’t solve the issue and they just have not built out up into this point any customer service function at all. In the last year, they’ve been saying they are going to start doing that. But listen, like they don’t have it now.
Lizzie O’Leary: You know, when I got hacked, I got a notification from from Instagram basically saying, like the email associated with your account has been changed. If you did not do this, let us know. But then I ended up in sort of like an endless loop of trying to change it, and the hackers would just change it right back.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It’s a very frustrating process because I’ve heard very similar stories to that, where the user goes through the process that Facebook is telling you to go through or Instagram and sometimes repeatedly and nothing happens. And then when nothing happens and you still don’t have your account, there’s literally no one you can go to for help.
Lizzie O’Leary: Kirstin talked with several people who got, well, I guess you could say creative in their attempts to recover their accounts.
Speaker 3: One thing that used to work is that as virtual reality division at one point had a customer service line. So some people were buying these expensive virtual reality headsets literally just to get someone in customer service to restore their Instagram or Facebook account.
Lizzie O’Leary: That’s crazy.
Speaker 3: It’s insane. I talked to people who literally spent like three or $400 on a headset that’s just sitting in their house now just to get their Facebook account back. Some people have turned to lawyers. They’ve tried to hire lawyers to send kind of like scary letters to various people aren’t matter. But even knowing who to email it to is kind of challenging. Right? So some people have emailed like Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg, and then they just don’t get a response back. Another common one I’ve heard is and this makes sense to me, finding just random nine employees in your area on LinkedIn and just messaging them for help. I mean, people that have nothing to do with accounts or customer service. But again, none of these seem like surefire ways to get people.
Lizzie O’Leary: When this happened to me, I kept thinking like, Metta must have teams of people whose job it is to help with this stuff, do they?
Speaker 3: You would really think that. But no, they don’t. And, you know, there’s a lot of reasons for that. One of the reasons is the expense. Think of having customer service for 3 billion people, basically. Right. So they haven’t spent that money. On it yet. The other reason is a cynical reason, which is many users are not their customers. We are not paying for this service. Right. So why would they help us? Now, that’s that’s the sort of cynical viewpoint of this matter has said in the past that it could be a security issue if they have people on the phone talking to you. Maybe they’re actually talking to a hacker. I’ve heard that explanation, too. So it’s unclear why they have no one yet.
Lizzie O’Leary: What did they say to you in your reporting process?
Speaker 3: They have definitely said that they’re now looking at building out some kind of customer service function. And they have acknowledged that it’s going to be hard and it’s going to take a while. When I recently reported that matter, employees were themselves, some of them facilitating this hacking. They, of course, have said they do not stand for that. They’ve been firing these employees, investigating the issue. So they they seem to be on it somewhat. But man, there’s a lot of users having trouble.
Lizzie O’Leary: We reached out to Metta for comment. A company spokesperson told us that in 2021, Metta formed a team to improve customer support and started building a customer support platform. They said, quote, Our goal is to ensure the people and businesses who rely on Meadow’s platforms every day can get support when they need it.
Lizzie O’Leary: Do we have any way of knowing how many users are having trouble or how big an issue this is?
Speaker 3: That is one of the things I would love to get to the bottom of. I’ve never seen a number and I’ve looked for one. Maybe not super hard, but I don’t think there’s been one like publicly reported. I mean, I can tell you anecdotally, I hear stories like this all the time. Like every week I’m getting many user emails often asking me for help and I feel so terrible that there’s nothing I can personally do for these people that have lost, you know, a lifetime of memories or their business that’s being run on Facebook or something like that.
Lizzie O’Leary: I noticed that that when I was hacked, I made the mistake of tweeting about it and it triggered this like flood of people replying to me saying, like, I run a service that can help you get your account back. You know, Demi here messaged me here. Is there like a weird little ecosystem of shady dealers who prey on people who’ve lost their accounts?
Speaker 3: Yes, 100% there is. The strange thing is, so there are these people claiming that they can get your account back. And I’ve talked to users who have literally paid thousands of dollars to these people. However, sometimes it seems to work, right? So this is the part where it seems like some of these people and I’ve talked to people who have claimed us have some kind of in with a model employee. So there legitimately does seem to be some people who have some kind of connection to help you get your account back. But then there’s definitely a lot of others that are just taking your money and months go by and nothing happens to your account.
Lizzie O’Leary: When we come back. There is an internal meta system that can help, sort of, but it’s kind of a big mess.
Lizzie O’Leary: There is, it turns out, an internal channel at Metta that can help people get their accounts back. It’s known as oops.
Speaker 3: And what that is, is it’s a way for metta employees and contractors to not only help get their accounts back, but friends and family. And it’s a boast to be for people, you know, Right. Or like business partners or someone on Mark Zuckerberg’s team or something like that. But it’s just, you know, so many people are having trouble with their accounts that the number of so-called tasks happening in this news channel has just risen over the years dramatically.
Lizzie O’Leary: I mean, the very existence of a channel like that both makes total sense and is like a wildly inequitable system. Oh, you have to know someone whose cousin works at Facebook in order to get your name in front of a human.
Speaker 3: Exactly. The problem, too, is it wasn’t initially founded that way. Right. Because these problems with the hacking and all of this, again, I don’t have any numbers. This is purely anecdotal, but they seem to have been rising or they seem to be more prevalent in recent years to me at least. And so I think it wasn’t set up that way. The UPS channel, it was it was truly supposed to be just an internal system for employees and not this sort of like backdoor way for all users to try and get help.
Lizzie O’Leary: Who has access to it?
Speaker 3: Not employees, but also contractors, which is very odd. Like security guards, physical security guards that are stationed in many offices as part of the process of working for them at a location they’re onboarded to be able to use the system. And so that sort of opens the door for a lot more access than just employees.
Lizzie O’Leary: Perhaps it was inevitable, given the amount of power involved, that the OOP system would be abused, too. Kirsten broke a story showing that Mehta was investigating employees and contractors for basically selling their access to it.
Speaker 3: What some employees allegedly were doing was actually aiding the hackers so they would accept a bribe from a hacker to get access to a user’s account. So basically, it was a way for someone on the outside to easily access Facebook user data, which is just, you know, terrible. And so this is obviously a huge problem not Dnata is aware of and is investigating because you can’t have obviously your own employees and contractors, by the way, some of which were physical security guards, improperly accessing user accounts.
Lizzie O’Leary: Do we know how many people had access to the group’s channel?
Speaker 3: Most employees and a lot of contractors have thousands and thousands of people have access to file an oops claim through that channel. What we reported in our most recent story was that Facebook was investigating more than two dozen employees and contractors for improperly accessing those accounts.
Lizzie O’Leary: That’s kind of a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And, you know, they have lawyers on it. They’ve been sending these really scary lawyer letters to current and former employees and other intermediaries who are sort of facilitating this access of accounts. So they’re definitely aware of it.
Lizzie O’Leary: You know, I think it’s possible that someone could listen to this and say, like, get over yourself. It’s just your Instagram account. It’s just Facebook. This is not real life. And I wonder what people who you’ve talked to who have lost their accounts would say to that.
Speaker 3: When I first started thinking about this issue, I was kind of like, okay, like, I guess I would be bummed if I lost my Instagram, but like, the photos are on my phone. No, I mean, first of all, there’s the category of people that have literally built small businesses around Instagram and Facebook, and their pages are set up to, you know, to advertise themselves to the world. And they’ve spent years building up followers and all of this. And to have that destroyed by sort of one fail, like confusing swoop is just, you know, terrible.
Speaker 3: And then I personally am most affected by the people who have their life’s memories on Facebook and haven’t thought to save photos. You know, these are often older people. I heard from someone whose parent had died and their whole memories were on Facebook and they can no longer access that account and they couldn’t get anyone to help them. And so it’s these people I feel really the worst for.
Lizzie O’Leary: God is just a reminder of how much and maybe to some degree, not even now, but even just a few years ago when I think all of us were maybe a little naive about technology, how much our lives are interwoven with these services.
Speaker 3: Definitely. And I think that it’s easy to forget that they run this platform. Right? We are on their platforms. So it’s our photos and memories and comments and all of this. But at the end of the day, like if there’s a problem, you need to be able to reach someone there because you’re using that page from them, basically. And so it’s really a good reminder that you should be backing this stuff up. You should not really solely be relying on these tech platforms for this kind of thing, especially if you’re not going to be able to reach someone.
Lizzie O’Leary: I cannot imagine that someone in the communications department or hell, even the executive team at MIT, to read a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about how much of a problem this was and just thought like, Yeah, let’s just ignore that. Are they making changes to address this?
Speaker 3: This has been an issue they’ve been like following for about a year now. They’ve been doing this big internal investigation specifically into the issue of employees accessing improperly user accounts. And so they seem to be on it in that respect. And also in regards to the OOPS channel, they’ve definitely tightened up access, especially among contractors accessing that channel. But, you know, it’s hard to say exactly what they’re going to be doing and what what’s going to happen going forward. In a way, it hurts users, right? Because tightening that one access is, again, the only way for a user to get help some time. So it’s just it’s.
Lizzie O’Leary: So God, that’s our job, right? If they use it, if they shut down that channel, like what what hope do people have.
Speaker 3: Right, exactly.
Lizzie O’Leary: Meta also laid off roughly 11,000 people toward the end of last year, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would make customer service any easier.
Speaker 3: I do wonder, and I absolutely do not know any of this for sure. This is pure speculation. But I do wonder, despite what they’ve said about building out customer service, if, you know, we’re in this environment where we’ve had a lot of tech layoffs, not just them, if that’s going to remain a priority for them going forward, it clearly hasn’t been a priority for a number of years. So it seems like something that would be easy to just put to the side for a little bit longer. But, you know, they’ve stuck by their statements that they are moving forward with customer service. So let’s hope that really happens.
Lizzie O’Leary: Been reporting these stories as it kind of made you think at all about how tech companies think about the users of their services.
Speaker 3: I think about that a lot. It’s actually why I get interested in stories like this, because I think, strangely, sometimes users get overlooked when we cover tech companies. You know, I think we’re so focused on and rightly so, right? We’re so focused on like how is Facebook moderating content or how is Elon Musk changing Twitter? Right. You start seeing stories about how is the user affected. And the funny thing is, right, none of these tech companies could exist without the user. So I just think it’s kind of an under looked area sometimes, especially for the media. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be covering that other stuff, but it is definitely overlooked, I think.
Lizzie O’Leary: These users, the people who provide the data the big tech companies are built on, are more than just numbers, and their accounts to them have become digital appendages, either because they are inextricably linked to their work life or their chronicles of their children, or just some way to find human connection. They might love their accounts, but it doesn’t feel like Meadow loves them back.
Speaker 3: I talked to this woman, Brooke, who built her kind of modeling career on Instagram, and she is one that for some reason just kept getting targeted by hackers, probably because she has an enormous account following like 700,000 followers or something like that. And she paid upwards of $10,000 total to various intermediaries. So not just one. She paid like $7,000 to one. Her account came back. Then a few months later, it got hacked again. She still couldn’t reach anyone at Facebook. She found a different intermediary, paid like three or $400. A couple more months went by, got hacked again. And so she just keeps like, spending all this money.
Speaker 3: And, you know, these people have no idea who these intermediaries are. I mean, she didn’t really know a lot of their names or what their backgrounds were. Sometimes they’re just like on WhatsApp. It’s very dodgy. And so that kind of thing, the desperation of that is just really sad that you have to go through that just to get your account back.
Lizzie O’Leary: Kirstin Grind, Thank you so much for reporting on this and for talking with me.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me.
Lizzie O’Leary: Kirstin Grind is an enterprise reporter for the Wall Street Journal. And that is it for our show today. What next?
Lizzie O’Leary: TBD is produced by Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Jonathan Fisher. Alisha montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. TBD is part of the larger What Next Family. And we’re also part of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, Arizona State University and New America. And if you are a fan of the show, I have a request for you. Become a Slate Plus member. Just head on over to Slate.com Slash what next?
Lizzie O’Leary: Plus, to sign up. All right. We will be back next week with more episodes. I’m Lizzie O’Leary. Thanks for listening.
