The struggle between real information and fake information is not too different from the fight against spam email, which took a long time but was worth it
To put it mildly, the last ten days have been tough to watch. Following the news triggers anger, and it makes me feel ashamed.
Context & Ripple Effects
Om Malik's spam-email analogy lands in a corpus that has been documenting the same war from several fronts: the information explosion that was supposed to produce consensus instead made agreement on truth harder as trust eroded big data's broken promise of shared truth, while users learned how bots fake page views and conversations until the internet itself started feeling fake.
The human cost side is already on record — fact-checkers at Alt News fighting ruling-party misinformation on Facebook services Alt News' uphill fact-checking battle, Facebook's own Indian partners describing a deluge during the India–Pakistan tensions, and platform enforcers paying personally, with Twitter's former trust-and-safety chief recounting public attack and abuse after Donald Trump turned on him Trump's public attack on Twitter's safety chief. The spam framing matters because it predicts duration: this is a decades-long filtering problem, not a one-off cleanup.
First-order effects
- Fact-checking organizations like Alt News absorb the immediate load — verifying claims faster than bad actors can produce them, on platforms whose own partners describe being overwhelmed by volume.
- Individual moderators and trust-and-safety executives become targets themselves, as the message-board-era pattern of aggrieved trolls recurs at national scale in Trump's conflict with social media moderators versus trolls, replayed by Trump.
Second-order effects
- Platforms are pushed into an arms-race cost structure familiar from spam: filters, labels, and takedowns must scale continuously because each enforcement step provokes counter-moves from both spreaders and the politicians who defend them.
- Fact-checking partnerships become politically exposed — once a platform's verification work touches ruling-party narratives in markets like India, the checker becomes part of the story, straining those relationships.
Third-order effects
- If the spam analogy holds, misinformation defense becomes permanent infrastructure — reputation systems and filtering embedded invisibly into distribution rather than episodic fact-check articles.
- But the analogy has a limit the corpus makes clear: spam had an objective definition and 'truth' does not, so unlike the spam wars, the endgame here is contested politically rather than settled technically — which is why the fight outlasts any single platform's policy cycle.
The trend: Information ecosystems are settling into spam-war economics — industrial-scale filtering against cheap-to-produce fakes — with the decisive difference that the target lacks spam's clean technical definition.