WeChat users are handwriting apologies to get their banned accounts back | Hacker News Reader

WeChat users are handwriting apologies to get their banned accounts back

restofworld.org

17 pointshardmaru7 comments

>Xian Jingjing, a 21-year-old tech worker in the southwestern province of Sichuan, told Rest of World she was banned from WeChat in October 2021, after someone hacked into her account and posted spam messages from it. With the payment services disabled, Xian, then a university student, could not even go grocery shopping by herself.

>After Xian appealed, Tencent’s customer service asked for a handwritten letter, which Xian drafted in her dorm room before carefully copying onto a separate piece of paper. “I really understand what I did wrong now. I regret it very much,” her letter read. “Really, please give me a chance. You all work so hard. Thank you!”

The real lesson is wechat has relatively responsive in person customer support. If only I can write an insincere apology to Google to reinstate my Youtube Premium account banned falsely for "spam", instead of trying automated repeals attempts throttled to every couple weeks. While I'M STILL BEING CHARGED MONTHLY because the membership page becomes inaccessibly when the account is removed.

>If only I can write an insincere apology to Google to ...

I don't know, but likely the Google AI would decide that your apology is insincere and thus unacceptable.

Wow, and when you’re banned by the government for being critical of Xi and can no longer buy groceries, what then?

As someone who knows people invited to tea with PRC police for wrong think as well as people, including myself who has problem with automated Google service bans, guess which one was easier to address? In comparison CCP seems downright pleasant to deal with, you typically get multiple warnings with human followup before even getting dragged into station to write insincere self criticism letter and then get on with your life. From article, looks like wechat is the same. Dealing with Google on the other hand has been nothing but and automated sisyphean void including the alleged "real human" TM support from paid Google One sub that still copy and pasted the same response about how they can't stop charging me for a service on an (actually two) account they banned. Like worse case scenario for losing wechat if one made Xi angry and being false-positived by Google AI shenanigans is getting new cell number and registering new account. Except in PRC, before getting to that point you might have chance to clear things up with a real live human, sometimes they even followup with you. I know I'm being flippant, but having dealt with CCP bureaucrats for years, and recently Google support, only mildly.

You don't really need a YouTube account though. Not saying it doesn't suck, but you don't need it to buy groceries. Don't even need a Google account.

Plus IMO Google aren't trying to censor your speech, they just have asinine systems and zero customer support.

You dont need wechat either when theres more popular alipay. Or unionpay / jdpay. Even social credit doesn't deny essentials. It sucks not having wechat but even that's a matter of getting new sim+account. I'm not trying to draw equivalency. Just musing how shitty dealing with google is.

Google is really bad at customer service I agree, but at least they’re not going to send masked men to your house at night.

I guess I just find the equivalence distasteful.

Though I do think google is effectively a utility company with some of the services they provide. Maybe there should be regulation on how much recourse people should have when they’re banned from necessary parts of their life like their gmail account

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