Facebook's moderation team faces far different incentives and consequences than you when checking if an account is spam. Which is worse - a false positive, or a false negative?

Facebook would rather leave 999 false profiles up and not accidentally close 1 genuine profile that just happens to look spammy. From their perspective, ruining someone's Facebook experience by deleting their account is worse than letting everyone else have a slightly worse experience (after all, even those fake profiles are generating ad revenue).

In contrast, Youtube is flagging, demonetizing, and three-striking channels left and right, using much more trigger-happy moderation (and even auto-mods) to control videos. They have plenty of content creators, but need to keep both viewers and lawyers happy.

Be careful that you know where you stand on these platforms, especially on important things like Amazon AWS accounts.

Facebook will happily ban real people using names they are commonly known by if that's not their birth name. I agree that false positives are bad but they need to take a look at their prioritisation of these actions.

https://www.shortlist.com/tech/facebook-has-fixed-its-real-n...

I am sure I will sound naive to you but what do you mean by AWS accounts here?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service which, to put it briefly, allows you to run websites. You could have a physical server rack in a datacenter near you, or spin up some servers on AWS (or Google Cloud, or Azure).

A lot of very large companies use it, including a lot of Fortune 500s for their ordinary company websites, as well as major web apps like Netflix, Reddit, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. And of course Amazon itself.

Now, those listed sites probably would get a call if something were to happen, but too many HN startups are running on AWS accounts linked to the founder's gmail and personal shopping account. Imagine if a dispute over a return of some counterfeit junk bought on Amazon by some CTO suddenly took down all of Netflix...

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. https://aws.amazon.com/

Closing someone's https://aws.amazon.com/ account for any reason potentially destroys their business and (if not reversed promptly) loses data.

Anecdotally, Facebook seems to have gotten worse at handling fake account reports recently. I have a hunch that it’s because their moderation team has grown, and the average moderator ability hasn’t kept up.