[aandon]

Indeed I know it's a close-knit community. Most of our 20-person team came from anti-fraud teams at Google. I'm guessing the "silliness" you're referring to is the talk of Facebook not being incentivized to block spammers. I think kbenson articulated best what I was trying to say, that there are tradeoffs in blocking good users and decreasing apparent user volume when fighting fraud. Facebook would obviously not be wise to catch every single fraudster because there would be a high number of false positives, so a balance must be struck. As I'm sure you know, fraud teams at many companies often clash with the marketing team because they're protecting the bottom line (sometimes at the expense of the top line) respectively, and vice versa.

[Wagthesam]

I worked at a company with a spam variable in the backend. 0 for eliminating most spam engagement actions like likes. 1 for letting all spam in.

We didn't set it to 0.

There's sometimes positive value in spam. Ex Instagram users get a boost when their pictures are liked, by someone real or not.