What we have to appreciate with SPAM, is what impact does it have on the real world? It's the exact same thing that comes through into your mailboxes, it has to be backed up, which costs fuel to run the servers which back it up. Each Email provider / Social Media company has to keep all that SPAM (read as sh*tE) backed up on multiple servers which require electric (read as Fossil fuel burning) to facilitate the storage of basically hundreds of Petabytes of rubbish... it's the digital slag heap.
I'm no ecomental fruit loop (far from it), but it's been on my mind recently as to how much companies like Google / Microsoft / Facebook etc. spend on keeping spam backed up; and how much that has an effect on burning fossil fuels... feck having to split your waste once a week - more than 70% of ALL email is SPAM.
Social Media aside, there are an Estimated 140 Billion Emails sent every day... so roughly 100 Billion of those are SPAM, sh*te, crap, virus, rubbish, pollutant. Most Spam emails are below 100kb to ensure that the spammers don't overload networks, so to take that as an average... every day... 100kb x 100B = 100 Trillion kb = roughly 100 Petabytes a day of cack that has to be mostly backed up.
When you consider in 2008 the data centres in the USA alone consumed as much as 5 million houses during the same period (
Link) it starts to look quite mental how aggressive and scary SPAM really is to the "Real" world.
