True spammers and spreaders of disinformation should be countered.
What is spam, I think most people know spam when they see it, however disinformation should never be lumped in with spam in my opinion. Just because some one does not believe in the same thing as someone else, is no reason to down vote it or to call it disinformation.
The definition of spam changes with each platform. For example, tumblr and twitter encouraged the sharing of memes. Twitter doesn't care about cut and paste. So, they would encourage bloggers to tweet the tag line of a blog post ... despite the fact that such cut and paste jobs produce letter by letter copies of an article.
HIVE doesn't seem to be worried about the fact that the tribal sites in the hive-o-sphere created duplicate content. Many of the tribal sites do not use the canonical link. I suspect that some are misusing the canonical link.
To fill their site with graphics Twitter developed the OG standard. When you tweet about a web page, Twitter will display the image from the reference if it uses the OG tag. This activity would be considered a copyright infraction on HIVE.
Academic journals consider commerce related messages to be spam.
Some places accept commerce, but draw the line at any message containing an affiliate link.
Some places reject affiliate links ... but except their own links.
Every platform will have a completely different definition of spam.
Since every platform has a different definition of spam; i think that it is crucial for HiveWatchers to communicate when they start downvoting an author.