I often wonder if this has happened to people with more clout who have managed to pull strings to get it sorted, or if Google have just got lucky and managed to avoid hitting someone who might actually be in a position to fight back.
Lots of other reasonable explanations that match the available evidence and involve Google caring about this issue. For example, their hands could be tied by legal forces beyond their control. Or they could care a great deal, but perhaps they have been unable to resolve this issue with an acceptable false-negative level on actual bad actors. Another possibility is that the ban was well-earned and the article's author knows this and simply has not disclosed the fact to the readership.
My issue with these bans is not the bans themselves, but the Kafkaesc process in which you are supposed to argue why you think their decision is wrong without knowing what they based the decision on.
For every account banned, one million new users will enter the Google ecosystem. Bans cost them nothing in the long run, but having reviews to justify bans would.
Last week I created a brand new Facebook account as I recently moved to a new city and am somewhat desperate to meet people, and Facebook events can be useful for this (as much as I loathe Facebook, my mental health is a bit more important right now). I got banned after about 2 minutes. I didn't actually do anything on the platform. I managed to click to about 2 or 3 pages.
What set this off? Who knows. Maybe some browser settings? Previous user(s) of my IP address? Those pages I clicked on? Something else? It surely wasn't anything I actually did as I didn't really interact with the platform at all.
I suspect that if I asked some high-up Facebook engineer to look in to it they wouldn't be able to actually give me an answer either beyond "The Algorithm determined there were risk factors".
As to your FB ban, I'm sorry that happened but I have no insight to share.
Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.
Funny enough, when I checked after posting my previous comment I could log in and it was all good. I didn't do anything, and now I got an email saying "Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards". All I did was log in, view the home page, and close the tab.
I requested another review :-/
Theres nothing stopping them from coming clean after the period of that order has dropped though.
The first is what I've heard being called "a healthy dose of obscurity". With a large enough pool of users, there is a finite number of behaviors that would trigger a certain ban rule. To avoid having their triggers reverse-engineered, they say as little as possible.
The second is is reasons being subject to interpretation. The risk there comes in a variety of flavors from PR risks to lawsuit risks when a developer are banned for X but there's an important nuance to X that the developer ignores by choice or otherwise.
I don't mean to defend anyone here, I'm just hoping that someone smarter than me will tackle this somehow.
Or, more likely: they "care," but not enough to actually spend the money to fix the problem (e.g. quit relying so much on algorithms, and staff a department of real people to apply some human judgement).
My understanding is there's a cultural problem at Google, where they think stuff like this must be done algorithmically, even if it's not a actually a job for an algorithm.
To be clear, I'm not defending Google here. The "ban-you-and-everyone-that-has-ever-had-contact-with-you-without-telling-you-why" system is obviously nuts-o and has caught a bunch of innocent bystanders off-guard.