Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1908.06173

The History of Digital Spam

Emilio Ferrara
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

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.

Explore related subjects

cs.CYcs.HCcs.LGcs.SI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Emilio Ferrara. 2019-08-14. The History of Digital Spam. https://doi.org/10.1145/3299768

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A Brief AI Literacy Intervention Does Not Significantly Reduce Over-Reliance and Increases Under-Reliance on ChatGPT: A Randomized Study

In this study, we examined whether a brief AI literacy intervention influences high school students' reliance on recommendations from large language models (LLMs). In a randomized experiment, students were assigned to either a control group receiving a brief introduction to LLMs or an intervention group receiving additional information about how LLMs work, their limitations, and effective usage strategies. Participants then solved eight math puzzles with ChatGPT's advice, which was incorrect in half of the trials. Results indicated widespread over-reliance, with incorrect recommendations adopted in 52.1% of the trials. The intervention did not significantly reduce over-reliance. Instead, it led to an increase in under-reliance, as students were more likely to reject correct recommendations. These findings provide preliminary evidence that brief text-based interventions may be ineffective in fostering appropriate reliance. More comprehensive and interactive approaches may be required to meaningfully influence students' real-world reliance on LLMs.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

Your Programming Students' Cognition with ChatGPT: Higher Performance, Lower Retention, and Reduced Ownership

Generative AI can improve students' programming performance, but successful task completion may not reflect what they retain. We examined performance, retention, cognitive load, and ownership in a controlled between-subjects experiment with 59 undergraduate computer science students, 55 were retained for analysis. Participants completed three introductory C programming tasks with access to ChatGPT-4.5 or conventional web search without generative AI. We measured task performance, self-reported mental effort and difficulty, pupillary responses, heart rate variability, and ownership, and assessed cued recall immediately and 48 hours later. ChatGPT-assisted students achieved higher coding scores (89% vs. 69%) but lower recall scores immediately (41% vs. 53%) and after 48 hours (39% vs. 52%). There was no significant difference in the loss of recall information over 48 hours between the groups. Self-reported mental effort increased less across tasks in the ChatGPT condition (Holm-adjusted p = .047), and students attributed less of the submitted code to themselves (45% vs. 81%). Confirmatory physiological tests did not detect significant differences in trajectories between conditions; substantial data loss limits their interpretation. These findings reveal a gap between assisted task performance and subsequent recall and sense of ownership in this setting. They motivate the need for assessment practices and AI learning tools that require students to explain, retrieve, and contribute to the work they submit as active participants in their education.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

Open Platform Field Experiments: Expanding the Design Space of Experimental Research on Social Media

Despite a growing demand for causal evidence about social media, independent researchers remain severely constrained in their ability to conduct experiments directly on online platforms. To cope, multiple methodological workarounds have emerged - from controlled surveys and simulations to client-side overlays and platform partnerships - each requiring distinct trade-offs between desirable experimental properties. The recent emergence of open social media platforms offers a qualitatively different methodological opportunity. Here we propose a design space of social media experimentation and discuss Open Platform Field Experiments (OPFEs). OPFEs represent a distinct class of experimental approaches that enable independent researchers to directly intervene on functional platform components - such as clients, recommendation systems, and moderation services - within live social media environments. Through a comparative analysis of experimental archetypes, we show that OPFEs occupy a previously unexplored region of the design space. We then bridge theory and practice by characterizing the architectural and governance elements that enable OPFEs, mapping them onto Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and illustrating the end-to-end lifecycle of a complete OPFE design. Overall, this work establishes OPFEs as a practical methodological paradigm for independent, transparent, and ecologically grounded experimentation on open social media.

cs.CY↗