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by bjourne 7 days ago
The spam filter does both. You can verify for yourself that flagging a comment most of the time is not enough to kill it.
1 comments

The spam filter influences the number of times a comment needs to be flagged before it becomes [flagged] and gets killed, but if it says [flagged], someone used the "flag" button at least once. Sometimes just downvoting a spam comment is enough to kill it; those just get marked [dead] and not [flagged].