Specifically Instagram. After many years, I still get regular messages from spam bots, usually pretending to be women that are romantically interested. It seems trivial to ban (or even prevent) those accounts, from a technical perspective. Reporting them also doesn't seem to do much. Why is this still a thing? This should have been a solved problem years ago no? Are there, besides technical reasons, other reasons to keep spam bots alive on their platforms?
The technical reason is sending a message is free.
The non-technical reason is companies prefer to keep the majority of the advertising money instead of pay users with it. Users don't complain and don't try alternative services.
> Why is this still a thing?
Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create/run one.
Like Nigerian email scams, it's still a thing because it still works.
Another AI war
Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial.