Washington Post: “…A quick Google search for “locked social media account” suggests plenty of people have already learned the hard way. Reddit threads, advice columns and emails to The Washington Post’s Help Desk show social media users are plagued by lost and hacked accounts and often driven to despair. Account recovery processes are frustrating and circular. Getting in touch with a human is rare, although Facebook said it will start testing a live chat option this week for a small number of people who are locked out of accounts because of “unusual activity” or violations of the site’s community standards. (Read on: With the right approach, some account-recovery stories have happy endings.) Some accounts end up locked because of lost passwords, others because of bad password hygiene and bad actors working constantly to break in. Social media companies, meanwhile, juggle customer service and account security as they try to make sure fraudsters don’t abuse recovery tools to wrongfully gain access. Some of this could be solved with additional security checks, but those may be bad business for companies with a grow-at-all-costs mentality…”