[gambler]

>No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting).

>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.

The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.

There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.

By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.

In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.