> "these systems have to be fully automated because no one could afford to operate manual systems at our scale", what's really being said is more along the lines of "we would not be able to generate as many billions a year in profit if we hired enough competent people to manually review cases our system should flag as ambiguous, so we settle for what we can get without compromising profits".

well anything that comes out of any business has these intentions for sure, but statements could be like multi-dimensional vectors, they could be doing 2 things at once

the ROI for fraud is low for a smaller platform and so it doesn't happen for smaller scale companies as much as it does for bigger scale. but given the interested party who is explicitly looking for the target cohort even the smaller platforms see the fraud

so even if social media as whole were to split into multiple entities, the ROI would still make sense for fraudsters to continue the fraud.

even if you have 1000s of entities, there would be a startup who can build a wrapper out of those 1000s of entities to make the fraud ROI possible. just like how there are businesses that offer scraping competitors