If I were setting up an automated abuse-report-receiving system that could automatically disable accounts, I would run some sort of filter for "is the account reporting the abuse itself a newly created account, and/or one with suspiciously low and non-human looking usage patterns?".
But on the other side, malicious actors can solve that problem by having clickfarm workers in bangladesh create 30 fake facebook accounts, post random drivel on them for a week to make them look like they're in use, and then use those to report abuse.
> If I were setting up an automated abuse-report-receiving system that could automatically disable accounts, I would run some sort of filter for "is the account reporting the abuse itself a newly created account, and/or one with suspiciously low and non-human looking usage patterns?".
That does not help against these kiddy vandals mentioned in the article.
The solution is not simple, if you're on the business management side and need to concern yourself with the fully loaded yearly office space, overhead, payroll/benefits cost of hiring hundreds of well trained, motivated, educated, english speaking customer support reps to support your 20+ million "free" customers...
It all boils down to classic capitalism: privatizing profits (money not spent on support teams) and socializing losses (wasted police funds on SWATting, often needed psychological care for victims, lost productivity due to hacks)...
Once these losses are factored in, the tide swings towards support staff. But unfortunately that won't happen any time soon.
Simple and cheap are not the same. The solution is simple, it's just also expensive. This is the general "problem" with customer support, good support is not cheap, nor is cheap support good.
requiring a credit card is a good way to stop 90% of the developing world from using your application... Stop a randomly chosen person on the street in a big city in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh and ask them if they have a visa or mastercard.
I guess this abuse reporting system was made to block spam via messages that are sent when adding a contact. But Microsoft doesn't check if the reported user is a spammer and whether he had sent any add requests.
