Popular users get lots of eyeballs on their content. If an average post will get 1 report per 10k views, a popular post with 10m views will get 1000 reports. It doesn't have to have a deeper meaning.

well, in that case, why not make the metric reports-per-view? if you make the metric a rate then it doesn't matter whether it gets 10k views or 10m views, the question becomes "what % of viewers thought this was worth a report".

The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.

Because brigading exists.

Brigading is likely a detectable pattern with enough data. Sure, it'd be hard to distinguish between residents of some chan brigading their enemy and somebody being a target of public shaming due to cancel campaign, but in my eyes it's a feature.

FB knows how many eyeballs there was. Their whole business is counting eyeballs. So they can easily teach whatever robot they use to take eyeball counts into account, and give more weight to "report per view" than to "absolute number of reports".

The tail end of more than a billion users is very long.

I wouldn't be surprise if a million users understood "report" as a downvote for a post they don't like.

Even if it was, it's really not Facebooks job to rework the social structure.

Facebook is already doing that. It just happens to be making choices about how to do it that maximize its profits while ignoring the voices of most of its users.

Facebook has already taken a stance on manipulating society.

> rather them maximize profits rather than decide to actually take a stance in manipulating society

That is manipulating society.

Sure, but at least they're being money grubbing than having hidden political agendas. I think Facebook could be much more evil if it decided to forego advertising profit.

Think literally selling elections to foreign governments as a business model, but in the open.