Spam Fighting @Scale 2016

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This post details the Spam Fighting @Scale 2016 conference, highlighting key technical and strategic approaches to combating spam and abuse across various technology companies. It emphasizes the importance of effective measurement (user feedback, weighted sampling), treating spam fighting as an engineering problem with economic considerations (disrupting payment providers), the acceptance of imperfect but cost-raising defenses, the prevalence of fake accounts, the utility of clustering for abuse detection, aligning incentives, and the possibility of fighting spam without content access (e.g., for end-to-end encrypted platforms). Specific talks covered Netflix's defense against account takeover and payment fraud, Facebook's weighted sampling for spam prevalence, LinkedIn's clustering for fake account detection, WhatsApp's success in reducing spam with end-to-end encryption, Airbnb's detection of fake inventory using ML and image similarity, and Facebook's organizational and technical strategies for anti-spam by design.