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It amazes me that on the one hand, people keep getting banned from Facebook for odd inscrutable reasons, while on the other hand, none of the spammers or scamme

It amazes me that on the one hand, people keep getting banned from Facebook for odd inscrutable reasons, while on the other hand, none of the spammers or scammers I've reported ever get banned, no matter how obvious. Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed. I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.

tjpnz 5y ago
Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  They probably have to have a higher threshold to ban people on a thing like marketplace. It's very hard to sell anything without someone complaining sometimes. Sometimes the complainers are scammers. And maybe they make money from it, so they don't want to kill the goose. I would also guess that heavy FB users are a terrific concentration of suckers.
- coryrc 5y ago
  My friend keeps getting his posts banned for selling firearms. Like the Apple Mac tower and a generator... very dangerous weapons.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals. That's why burglars and shoplifters call it Fencebook.
lkrubner 5y ago
Every time I see an article about the advance of AI, with the vague sci-fi theme of "AI is now so good it is about to replace humans" I think of the many, many stories I've heard like yours, where the FAANG seem unable to build even basic statistical systems, nevermind AI. Some articles suggest AI is on the verge of human sentience, meanwhile, in real life, I constantly encounter stupid algorithms, even from big companies with lots of money. The advertising companies are the worst. I bought a guitar and then, for the next 6 months, every ad I saw on every site was about guitars. How many guitars do they really think I'm going to buy in one year? It's really a once-every-two-or-three-years purchase, it doesn't justify the saturation I was exposed to. Or elevators. I'm in New York City and everyday I go into some building that has a terrible algorithm for its elevators. I don't need advanced AI, my life would be improved with even minor tweaks to most algorithms for elevators.
- visarga 5y ago
  Don't blame the algorithms, blame the people who decide policy. It's perfectly possible to find a ton of spammers in Google, FB and Twitter by manual and/or automated methods. Their continued existence shows they are tolerated.
- mulmen 5y ago
  It’s actually very simple. In the era of big data nobody looks at opportunity cost because you can’t put a KPI on it.
- dralley 5y ago
  > "AI is now so good it is about to replace humans" Clearly how good it is (not) is not an impediment to being pushed upon us and replacing humans. FAANG certainly seem to prefer the low cost over the quality of the results.
sockaddr 5y ago
On one hand I agree, it is perplexing. But then I realize that profile with a picture of a hot girl with lots of "friends" counts as a user that brings "engagement on the platform" so it's valuable to FB when they're trying to convince shareholders that the platform isn't dying. They're specifically incentivized to ignore those accounts and let them persist.
lupire 5y ago
The universe is not single dimensional. why would anyone want to constrain it that way? To ban no one or ban everyone would be terrible. Do the math: 1 million of 2 Billion legit users get banned wrongly. 2.9 Billion of 3 Billion slammers get banned. That leaves a huge amount of false positive and false negatives while still being almost perfect.
rasz 5y ago
Those are actual Facebook customers, paying for ads etc.

tjpnz 5y ago

Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals.

georgeecollins 5y ago
They probably have to have a higher threshold to ban people on a thing like marketplace. It's very hard to sell anything without someone complaining sometimes. Sometimes the complainers are scammers. And maybe they make money from it, so they don't want to kill the goose. I would also guess that heavy FB users are a terrific concentration of suckers.
coryrc 5y ago
My friend keeps getting his posts banned for selling firearms. Like the Apple Mac tower and a generator... very dangerous weapons.
reaperducer 5y ago
Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals. That's why burglars and shoplifters call it Fencebook.

lkrubner 5y ago

Every time I see an article about the advance of AI, with the vague sci-fi theme of "AI is now so good it is about to replace humans" I think of the many, many stories I've heard like yours, where the FAANG seem unable to build even basic statistical systems, nevermind AI. Some articles suggest AI is on the verge of human sentience, meanwhile, in real life, I constantly encounter stupid algorithms, even from big companies with lots of money. The advertising companies are the worst. I bought a guitar and then, for the next 6 months, every ad I saw on every site was about guitars. How many guitars do they really think I'm going to buy in one year? It's really a once-every-two-or-three-years purchase, it doesn't justify the saturation I was exposed to. Or elevators. I'm in New York City and everyday I go into some building that has a terrible algorithm for its elevators. I don't need advanced AI, my life would be improved with even minor tweaks to most algorithms for elevators.

visarga 5y ago
Don't blame the algorithms, blame the people who decide policy. It's perfectly possible to find a ton of spammers in Google, FB and Twitter by manual and/or automated methods. Their continued existence shows they are tolerated.
mulmen 5y ago
It’s actually very simple. In the era of big data nobody looks at opportunity cost because you can’t put a KPI on it.
dralley 5y ago
> "AI is now so good it is about to replace humans" Clearly how good it is (not) is not an impediment to being pushed upon us and replacing humans. FAANG certainly seem to prefer the low cost over the quality of the results.

sockaddr 5y ago

On one hand I agree, it is perplexing. But then I realize that profile with a picture of a hot girl with lots of "friends" counts as a user that brings "engagement on the platform" so it's valuable to FB when they're trying to convince shareholders that the platform isn't dying. They're specifically incentivized to ignore those accounts and let them persist.

lupire 5y ago

The universe is not single dimensional. why would anyone want to constrain it that way? To ban no one or ban everyone would be terrible. Do the math: 1 million of 2 Billion legit users get banned wrongly. 2.9 Billion of 3 Billion slammers get banned. That leaves a huge amount of false positive and false negatives while still being almost perfect.

rasz 5y ago

Those are actual Facebook customers, paying for ads etc.