Way back ~1990, when internet email was first being rolled out to non-technical employees at fairly-tech-savvy orgs, I noticed that there were a very small minority of people - yes, generally non-technical older women - who suffered from "Recreational Sharing Disorder". It didn't matter if the stuff was blond jokes, or "everyone has to pray for Katie, who has cancer", or "forward this 1,000 times and there will be world peace", or what. Obviously they had neither filters for credibility, nor good filters for respecting other peoples' time budgets and expressed interests. And as the number of connected users expanded, a tiny % of RSD cases could quickly generate enough email traffic to badly impact a site's email service. (Which was usually dial-up modem or fractional T-1.)

Mathematically, it was very interesting. And with an occasional reminder from management, they could pretty-well control their RSD at work.

These days, there's a toxic hot mess of politics and emotions laid over the whole situation. But it might be useful to recall that the underlying problem is mostly a network with a very large N, and the bell-curve distributions of certain human behaviors.