# The History of Digital Spam

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06173/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Should ChatGPT be Biased? Challenges and Risks of Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03738/) (2023)
- [Factuality Challenges in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05189/) (2023)
- [GenAI Against Humanity: Nefarious Applications of Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00737/) (2023)
- [Online Deep Learning from Doubly-Streaming Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11793/) (2022)
- [Classifying spam emails using agglomerative hierarchical clustering and a topic-based approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05296/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Social Cybersecurity: Techniques for Attack Detection, Evaluations, Challenges, and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04311/) (2025)
- [Harm in AI-Driven Societies: An Audit of Toxicity Adoption on Chirper.ai](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01090/) (2026)
- [Broken Gates: Re-evaluating Web Bot Defenses in the Age of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18659/) (2026)
- [Detecting Propaganda on the Sentence Level during the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12269/) (2021)
- [Detecting and Quantifying Malicious Activity with Simulation-based Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02483/) (2021)
- [Agentic AI: User Empowerment or Foreclosure?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06510/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spam!: that's what Lorrie Faith Cranor and Brian LaMacchia exclaimed in the title of a popular call-to-action article that appeared twenty years ago on Communications of the ACM. And yet, despite the tremendous efforts of the research community over the last two decades to mitigate this problem, the sense of urgency remains unchanged, as emerging technologies have brought new dangerous forms of digital spam under the spotlight. Furthermore, when spam is carried out with the intent to deceive or influence at scale, it can alter the very fabric of society and our behavior. In this article, I will briefly review the history of digital spam: starting from its quintessential incarnation, spam emails, to modern-days forms of spam affecting the Web and social media, the survey will close by depicting future risks associated with spam and abuse of new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (e.g., Digital Humans). After providing a taxonomy of spam, and its most popular applications emerged throughout the last two decades, I will review technological and regulatory approaches proposed in the literature, and suggest some possible solutions to tackle this ubiquitous digital epidemic moving forward.