Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point.

One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that.

It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives.

> None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.

The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.

> companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist

how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.