Google's Gary Illyes said on Twitter that Google doesn't train their algorithms to find spam by fetching and processing disavow files across the web. Google does of course use the disavow file to ignore links pointing to your site, but in terms of using it to find spam - Google says they don't use it. They said this before as well but hey, sometimes it is good to repeat things.
Many SEOs and webmasters are concerned about disavow files and specifically their site URL showing up in other people's disavow file. Gary Illyes from Google said "Oh I'm sure blackhats would love if we used it," because that would give them an easy way to perform negative SEO.
But Google says they aren't that dumb and they understand the landscape we are in.
Here are Gary's tweets:
None I know of, no
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) September 20, 2017
Oh I'm sure blackhats would love if we used it!
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) September 20, 2017
I am sure there are many SEOs that don't believe Gary but that isn't new either.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.