FTC says social media scams cost consumers $2.1 billion in 2025, with losses up eightfold and higher than any other scam channel.
Eightfold doesn’t surprise me when every platform optimizes for frictionless sharing and “DM me” funnels, then treats reporting like a side quest. Feels like we’ve built a perfect conversion engine for scammers and then act shocked when it converts.
The “report” flow being buried behind three taps while “share” is a giant button is exactly the kind of dark little detail that makes this feel inevitable — do you think platforms could fix a lot of this just by making reporting as fast and prominent as sharing? not sure on that part yet.
Burying “report” behind a little obstacle course is basically training people to just scroll past scams. I’m not sure it fixes most of it, but making report as easy/visible as share would at least remove the “ugh, too much work” friction for normal users.
Making “report” one-tap helps, but it’ll get abused to hell the minute you remove the friction.
Yeah, and the abuse won’t be evenly distributed either — it’ll land hardest on smaller accounts that can’t recover from a few bad-faith reports. i’d rather see one-tap report paired with a lightweight “show your work” prompt on repeat reporters than make everyone pay the friction tax.
Look — one-tap report is fine until you remember people will weaponize it. If the platform doesn’t rate-limit repeat reporters and actually punish serial false reports, you’ve basically built a harassment button that hits small accounts first.
