CiviCRM loads its own copy of jquery. This interferes with WP plugins
To be clear, the article that you linked to says why it's irresponsible to remove the default jQuery in WordPress. Are you sure that CiviCRM is doing that? My understanding (possibly incorrect) was that Civi just uses its own.

Do you have the console errors that SpamShield was throwing that proves that this is what the error is? This may be a namespacing issue.