Don't be sorry. If you receive something you don't want to receive, that is the definition of spam.

Wiktionary ‘defines’ spam as ‘unsolicited and unwanted’.

Elsewhere, Wikipedia describes spam as ‘unsolicited or unwanted’.

And vs. Or. Of course spam’s definition should use ‘and’.

When you sign up for a newsletter, and later decide you don’t want it, to call it ‘spam’ is merely metaphorical.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam

Nah. You forgot to quote the key word from those definitions: email. Not "newsletters subscriptions", not "promises to receive interesting emails", not "agreements to get sent x mails per week". Spam is unsolicited and/or unwanted email, period.

It does not matter whether you were tricked into subscribing to some newsletter or whether you checked a "receive interesting emails from us" box while paying for something.

If the email you just received is unsolicited and/or unwanted, then it's spam by definition.

The legacy definition of spam is any unwanted email, or "unsolicited commercial email"

But in the context of social media, what does spam mean? It isn't email. And an awful lot of it is simply self-promotion or commercial promotion.

And many FB groups and the like are permissive when it comes to posts that are really advertisements, or are just one person's definition of "off topic." And there are mechanisms for reporting content as "spam", but what does that even mean when it isn't an email?

I've found that many people have redefined the term "spam" as repetitive content, not unwanted/unsolicited content. I guess this comes from gamer/chat culture where there is talk of "spamming the jump button" or "spamming the chat" where it isn't the content that is remarkable, it is the repetition. You can kind of see where it comes from as most email spammers are quite repetitive and indiscriminate. But a spam email can be just one, and that definition doesn't seem to fly in the inherently noisy social media context.

I was just struck by this evolution of the term spam when I tried reporting some (unwanted by me) commercial self-promotion on social media, only to be told that it wasn't spam at all because the poster only posted it once. I guess a lot of it comes down to how territorial and defensive people are about their email inbox vs. social media feed.

I take exception with the ‘and/or’—-what prevents you from choosing precise language?

"Unwanted" is hard to define in a way not to include many things. When an acquaintance or relative sends me some bullshit meme or a silly joke, that's an unwanted email. It's not spam though.

That's why there usually needs to be some direct or indirect commercial gain involved too.

The impact of you clicking spam is exponentially worse than you expect.

I said please three times because laziness on your part is really really bad for us who do it right.