Dear Facebook,
As a startup business in the technology sector, our outlook towards you should be one of admiration. You should be a source of inspiration and a shining example of how to create a pathway to success in our industry. Right now, however, our perspective is bleak; mired by frustration, bewilderment, and ultimately underpinned by a sincere belief that up-and-coming businesses simply do not matter to you.
Here’s why.
On the 20th of December 2021, our business Facebook page was briefly compromised via one of our administrators falling victim to a hacker. The culprit changed the title of our company account to a long, spam-like message, written in Vietnamese. It’s important to note that this compromise was exclusively on Facebook’s platform, and was dealt with by our team incredibly quickly – it had no impact on www.revolancer.com, which remains safe and secure. We prioritise the security of our users’ accounts, but perhaps the same can’t be said for every platform.
After resecuring our page, we immediately sought to return the account to its previous state and, of course, to the correct company name, ‘Revolancer Ltd’. It became quickly apparent that Facebook refused to allow us to change our name back straight away, forcing us to wait an entire week before we could even begin to remedy the issue. This seemingly arbitrary waiting period left us in a very difficult position, given that any users that saw the new page name, or any potential customers trying to find our Facebook account, all had to see what was very clearly a compromised account. Not only does this have the potential to hurt our reputation as a business, but it may have also caused avoidable stress for the users of our platform.
Adding insult to injury.
Our frustrations with this situation were already considerable and after having tried to contact your customer support team on numerous occasions, our pleas fell on deaf ears. We reluctantly waited out the 7 day period, with our further attempts at making contact with you also being unsuccessful. On the 27th December 2021, we attempted to restore the correct account name, but were yet again knocked back by one of Facebook’s automated systems. This time, we were told that the change was too significantly different to the name currently in place. We tried to appeal to no avail, once again being met by automated messages and not a single human interaction.
The irony of this situation should be as obvious as it is insulting – you allowed an account that was suddenly operating from a different country and IP address to make sweeping changes to the operational intention, length, and even language of our business account without triggering any fail-safe checks. Yet, our earnest attempts to undo these changes were met with harsh restrictions, arbitrary timelines, and a deafening silence from your customer service support. It’s simply not good enough.
An inelegant solution.
We are publishing this open letter to you on the 6th January 2022, having only been able to return our Facebook page to some level of normality 3 days ago. It took several manual inputs to slowly remove the Vietnamese characters from our page name, whilst gradually assimilating ‘Revolancer’ back into our title. Despite our best efforts, your system continues to reject titles such as ‘Revolancer’ or ‘Revolancer Ltd’, as it considers these to be previously rejected name changes. We needn’t explain to you why this is so ludicrous, as it clearly speaks for itself, but it needs to be mentioned that your system tells us that none of our submissions have been manually checked. We have now had to settle on the name ‘Revolancer – Freelance Marketplace’ in order to get the page back into an usable position, however, it is worth noting that all of our followers were notified about each painstaking name change along the way.
Parting thoughts.
The amount of time, effort, and emotional labour required to fix such a trivial issue has made a genuine and noticeable impact on our productivity. We are a growing team, but ultimately still a small one, so when so much of our time has had to be redirected to problems caused by Facebook’s platform, it really hurts our operations. We aren’t writing this in order to publicly shame you, or indeed to lambast the hardworking folks behind the curtain of your company, but rather to make a sincere call for you to do better by your users. After our overwhelmingly negative experience, we can only assume that many, many others are put through similar every single day. That’s inexcusable.
Please, dedicate some more of your extensive resources to making sure nobody is left behind by your platform. We feel let down, but our support is redeemable with some concerted efforts to address these issues.
Sincerely,
Revolancer Ltd
Freelance marketplace: Revolancer