One of the first things that sparked my interest in trust and safety was an incident in the early days of Facebook. A user was suggested to me who was catfishing my own cousin. I reported them, of course, as I imagine most people would. Petty as I can be, I also messaged them to ask what their plan was, but was met with a block. I don’t recall ever seeing them banned (yes, I checked).
When push comes to shove, and scammers or catfish actually victimize someone, society seems to take this “You should know better!” stance. This feels worse than dismissive; it’s as if we condone these actions. We should be taking a proactive stance, rooting out scams and blocking their attack vectors. We should not be okay with seeing fraud or scams in broad daylight.
I don’t think we all are, either. The average person probably reports fraud and scams online, but nothing ever seems to come of it. I frequent TikTok and YouTube Shorts, where waves of these bots or outright scams are shown regularly. Yet no violations are ever found. Why is this? I think the surface-level opinion is that customer service is simply overloaded, and they’ll look into it(tm). I offer another viewpoint.
The fake profiles are the companies themselves.
They are buying services by marketing companies to artificially inflate their value. There are no violations found because they were proof of delivery, after all. Customer service is a legal requirement. A quick reporting feature doesn’t actually need to resolve tickets, so my AI bot reviewed your AI bot report and found nothing.