Comment by kmeisthax
6 years ago
"We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" is how the Internet has always worked.
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
This is a cultural problem as much as an economic imperative. Apple and Google both run app stores with distribution rules, but Apple will bend over backwards to try and get you in compliance with their rules, while Google will just delete your Gmail. I've also heard far fewer reports of Apple iCloud accounts getting summarily deleted compared to Google or Facebook.