[aeternum]

Removing spam could be considered a form of censorship. It is removing the speech of others.

Generally anti-spam measures facilitate rather than inhibit freedom of speech. A sufficiently popular internet forum without spam controls would quickly become mostly unusable.

In this case, doesn't censorship enable freedom to speak?

[Reelin]

These aren't singular global quantities. Such censorship reduces spammers' freedom to speak in order to preserve that of the other participants. Spamming closely resembles a tragedy of the commons (overuse of the system to solicit sales) and anti-spam an associated regulatory action.

The problem with such an analogy is that spam is inherently off topic - approximately none of the other participants actually want to see it. That's fundamentally different from this case. Whether you deem it misinformation or political speech, many of the participants clearly do want to see it. In fact, they want to see it so much that such information is consistently selected by the automated algorithms that are designed specifically to maximize engagement metrics.

[aeternum]

We should be careful not to conflate wanting to see something with clicks. By that metric, spam about free bitcoins has more interested participants than much of the political speech in question.