Multiple independent organizations inside a company each with their own rigid and inflexible operating procedures. The user to moderator ratio in the tens of thousands to 1. How is this hard to see?
What can human contact add here? Excuses or reasoning for the content? Given the media attention, someone will almost certainly have reached out if there was any way that a reason or excuse could possibly change the outcome. If they didn't that implies again that there's more to this story.
I'm not going to pass any judgement on what the "more to the story" is here, I don't have all the facts, but it seems obvious to me that there are more facts, and that people are working from different amounts of information here.
I don’t think that there’s really any “hidden” context here that would convince many (except maybe those who get their paychecks from big G) that google is not in the wrong.
Perhaps the hidden context here is that they also investigated the couple after the journal report and found other “violations” which were ban worthy after, not before, their case was aired publicly. I don’t think many people would consider this theoretical scenario fair either.
No idea about this case, but there are grey areas and the cowardly position is the legally/socially safest one, regardless of what one local police department decided. It doesn't make Google right, but it is what it is.