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Ask HN: Why is it not possible to report hacked social media accounts?

1 points by prpl ↗ HN
More than a few times in the past, I’ve seen accounts of friends hacked, usually facebook and instagram. In one recent case, it’s obviously a russian bot account because photos of Alyona Arshinova started appearing on the account. In a few other cases, it seemed to be possibly a personal account in the middle east after some time.

The friends in question had mostly given up on the accounts before they were hacked, but there has never been an option to report a hacked account on Facebook, Instagram, or if I recall, twitter either. Is this some kind of conscious decision?

5 comments

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sp332
You can report the post(s) individually. I guess the moderator who looks at the report will have to figure out that the account was hacked. Or just disable it if it's been abandoned by the original owner.
prpl
Yeah, there is nothing there which approaches “hacked” - the closest is “false information”

I was just wondering if there’s an actual reason for omitting that as an option - like maybe it had been abused terribly or something

paulpauper
you can report it but don't expect anyone to care that much
warning26
IRRC Facebook's report flow used to have a "This account has been hacked" reason selection, but they dropped it.
prpl
I vaguely remember that once too, haven’t seen it in a while