They can detect if you’ve used a very recently created account with little or no activity and will ban your account, possibly locking you out of legitimate content purchases, as happened to some users.
Completely absurd. Fuck Facebook.
Thanks for rounding up your market research here. It's a shame that Facebook's offering is so popular, but hopefully useful alternatives will continue to be available.
It's popular because it is astoundingly well engineered, the software side in particular, and the hardware specs represent an unbeatable value for the asking price. The devil is in the details though.