In The Last Six Months Techdirt’s Antispam Algorithm Has Stopped Over A Million Spam Comments; Should We Lose 230 Protections For That?

The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether or not algorithms deserve protections under Section 230. And I hear from lots of people that maybe Section 230 wasn't meant to cover algorithmic policing and recommendations of content. But that's utter nonsense.

The whole area of content moderation first came about as a response to the earliest versions of spam. And one thing that people learned quite quickly is that you can't manually police for spam if your site has even the slightest level of popularity. It will get flooded.

This is why any site needs to have some sort of automation to deal with spam. Indeed, for years, Techdirt has actually been using a combination of multiple different tools and setups to fight spam comments, but I'd never really looked into the numbers until just recently (mostly on a whim because I found the setting where those stats are!), and it's kinda stunning. First off, we get way more spam attempts than I had even realized.

In the last six months alone, Techdirt received over 1.3 million attempts to spam our comments. That's compared to the slightly over 40,000 legitimate comments we received in the same period. Here's a chart of the spam comments per month:

I have no idea why spam grew so rapidly in January and February before falling in March, but even with 125,000+ spam messages in March, it completely dwarfs the amount of legitimate comments we got. The only possible way to keep up is to use automated systems. And, to be clear, while some small percentage of spam does get through, and we have a few legit comments caught in the spam filter, I'd argue we do a pretty good job of catching most spam, and allowing through most comments.

But, the larger point: without the multiple algorithmic systems we use to catch spam, we'd never be able to manage that amount of spam. Hell, we couldn't handle manually dealing with less than 1% of the spam we actually get attempted right now. It would overwhelm us.

So if the courts (or, horror of horrors, Congress) were to decide that algorithms" no longer are protected under Section 230, it would destroy Techdirt. While the 1st Amendment would eventually protect us, the lack of 230 protections would make using a spam filter a liability that would open up the risk of having to fight a full legal battle just to prove our right to block spam comments.

As such, our choices would be to turn off the algorithms and let spam flow, shut down our comments entirely, or risk ruinous lawsuits for the harm" of trying to stop spam with an automated filter.

Technological filters (i.e., algorithms) should obviously be protected by Section 230, because without them, we lose the ability to fight spam, and the amount of such content is truly overwhelming. And that's just for us, a pretty small site. Imagine how larger sites are dealing with this stuff.