The History of Digital Spam

Spam! That's what Lorrie Faith Cranor and Brian LaMacchia exclaimed in the title of a popular call-to-action article that appeared 20 years ago in Communications.10 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 (AI), for example, 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. An omni-comprehensive, universally acknowledged definition of digital spam is hard to formalize. Laws and regulation attempted to define particular forms of spam, for example, email (see 2003's Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.) However, nowadays, spam occurs in a variety of forms, and across different techno-social systems. Each domain may warrant a slight different definition that suits what spam is in that precise context: some features of spam in a domain, for example, volume in mass spam campaigns, may not apply to others, for example, carefully targeted phishing operations.