* Amazon is a total mess right now, and this is great investigative reporting. I think Amazon is going to go through a rough year or two in PR terms. They need to get this under control quickly.
* Amazon can pretend that it's just a platform, but in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval (even if it's not as full a stamp as, say, buying the item from Costco.) Right now, they're abusing that consumer trust by doing a lousy job of monitoring product listings on their site. Over the long term, they risk losing that trust altogether. That's a huge risk to them, and it's a little short-sighted to take no ownership of product listings on their site as the basis for legal defense.
* This reminds me of the recent reporting about AirBnb dealing with scammy listings in Canada [0]. I think that both AirBnb and Amazon are capable of getting these problems under control, but they haven't proven it as of yet. When the solution comes, it will be expensive and involve a lot of human labor. That is true no matter how many times they wave their magics wands and yell "Machine Learning!"
* Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/airbnb-montreal-aj-h...