On: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

[hardware2win]

> FB is big enough to afford investigation teams that cooperate with law enforcement to tackle the spam at the source.

Same can be said about Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc

Yet spam still exists, how is that possible if your assumption was true?

[3np → hardware2win]

Lack of incentives due to costs being externalized.

It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to enough.

[rrdharan → 3np]

Their profit motives are entirely aligned with reducing spam.

I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy. Sometimes they’re just hard.

[mschuster91 → rrdharan]

> I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy.

I didn't allege any conspiracy. I alleged that it isn't done because it isn't profitable enough.

Moderating is expensive as fuck, so platforms do the bare minimum required by law. Facebook makes 23 billion dollars net profit a year, Microsoft 72 billion dollars, Google/Alphabet around 60 billion dollars.

Even investing just 20% of these insane amounts of money into a joint effort to combat scams and cybercrime at the source (both by assisting law enforcement and by lobbying for laws) would put a serious dent into cybercrime. Imagine what someone like Pierogi of Scammer Payback, Trilogy Media and the other scambaiters could do if they had an actual budget, and now imagine what actual law enforcement could achieve if they had the resources to actually Follow The Money.