"Amazon declined to comment on the specific black hat consulting firms named in this story, but it told BuzzFeed News that these 'bad actors make up a fraction of activity' on the site."
Languages work this way when the meaning is unambiguous. No one is going to say "I used to live in London in the United Kingdom. The big one". No one's going to always say "So desu ne". No one's going to say "a small fraction" when "fraction" will suffice.
It does. People have a weird tendency (it's not that weird I guess, it's the same "force" that means less frequently used verbs are more likely to have regular conjugations) to just use <adjective>ness when there are so many beautiful words out there...
> It's natural language. Conciseness is high value.
But in this case the imprecision could very well be deliberately weasely. The kind of people whose job it is to offer official comment are also the ones whose profession is to exploit the ambiguity of natural language to lead you to think one thing while the reality is a less obvious interpretation.
So some number below 100% apparently.