Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, and all the rest depend on automating everything — and thus flouting the actual stated rules that they have.

I mean, losing your Twitter is annoying, but lots of people who write apps get their whole company banned by Google or Apple, so that they’re put out of business overnight — there’s no due process, no third-party appeal, no way to defend yourself if you are in the right or to change if you are in the wrong.

And the reason is simple — actually following their own rules, or in many cases the law, would be too expensive. It would cut into their windfall profits.

As a prominent example, I present the ads on Facebook. “Ads that are obviously fake” are, for me and many of my friends at least, a huge portion of the ads I see on Facebook.

For example, well over a year ago I ordered an LED light from a Facebook ad. I was sent essentially a bag of random electronics parts that supposedly needed to be soldered, including surface mount components — but there were no instructions! (For the uninitiated, SMT is designed for automated soldering and is almost impossible to do by hand.)

I contacted the company and got “instructions” — which did look like instructions for a real light, but not one using the components I had been sent.

They attempted to blame me for my inability to solder — even though the original ad gave no hint that this wasn’t a complete lamp — but I got my money back after complaining to PayPal.

However, Facebook offered no real way to complain about this ad. More, I see the same ad appearing every week, almost eighteen months later.

And that’s not the least of it. What with ads for “air conditioners” that have no hose to the outside world, or devices that promise to “double your internet speed”, it’s quite likely to me that “Bullshit ads” are a plurality of my FB experience. (Note that they actually place better ads on third-party site, but that’s another story.)

And yet they make it essentially impossible to ever get to a human — because it’s too expensive for them — so these ads continue on cheating people for years at a time.