Google said to be taking steps to keep political campaign emails out of Gmail spam bin Google has reportedly asked the US Federal Election Commission for its blessing to exempt political campaign solicitations from spam filtering. The elections watchdog declined to confirm receiving the supposed Google filing, obtained by Axios, though a spokesperson said the FEC can be expected to publish an advisory opinion …
Spam me with your political message and I won't vote for you. It's as simple as that.
However politicians are about an order of magnitude worse than the rest of sales and marketing for thinking that the world is quivering with anticipation for their next fart, brain or otherwise, so the notion that their spam can do them harm will be incomprehensible to them.
So... guess you probably don't vote for many races then eh? Maybe someone going for a water district seat and a judge or two? :)
That was my grave mistake... giving my real phone number on my voter registration. That changed when I moved and needed to update my registration. Hopefully that updated record will start making its way through their databases, wiping out my real number with the bogus one.
If fact, I didn't find out that governments sell these lists to anyone who can pony up the change. (They're not that expensive.) And I figured that out about 10-12 years ago when I gave a dedicated email address on my voter registration form and once the spam started spilling in, did some research and found that out.
-> Google has reportedly asked the US Federal Election Commission for its blessing to exempt political campaign solicitations from spam filtering.
Why not ask the FEC if it can dump all political campaign solicitations in the bin. Get the senders to register an approved "sent from" address, and direct them straight to the bin.
In the UK we have the dubious pleasure of "party political broadcasts" on the television around general election time. I think about 10 people watch these. The rest put on the kettle and wait for them to finish. The collective "uhhhhhh" can be heard throughout the land. Politicians in their ivory towers think we listen for their every word. Whoever it is and whichever party it is, they are all much the same. From "there will be no whitewash at the White House" to "I did not inhale stateside", to "we are all in this together" in the UK. If I sound cynical it is with good reason.
Having seen quite a lot of General Elections come and go, I have found it to be one of the truest things ever.
I learned about the stupidity of idealism a long time ago.
They are different in what they promise, but they are all the same in the constraints that they face when they achieve office. And despite how they try and present themselves, they are all the same self-serving sociopathic narcissists.
IIRC back in the days of 3 TV channels in the UK some party political broadcasts were simultaneous on all 3 channels. ! Nightmare!
At least in these days zillions of channels and streaming services they don't/can't do that so you can just go watch something else.
Not that there is often anything actually worth watching on TV anymore.
Surely the spam filter is a system wide one? (rather than specifically adjusted for each user) so the percentages filtered by each mail provider reflect the political bias of their users... I seriously doubt that Google hard coded a left favouring bias in their Spam detector or that Microsoft similarly coded a right favouring bias in theirs.
The big spam filters are claimed to be contextual, rather than based on senders email address, so quite how one might hard code political bias in a spam filter I really don't know - though AI may play a role.
The GoP are concerned that their messages are reaching the libtards and the libtards are flagging it as spam, adjusting the alogrithm as a whole. Sucks to be the GoP spamming Gmail I guess, better luck with Microsfot users.
Boils my micturate that political campaigns are exempt from GDPR.
"Dear Mr E. Scot
Please vote for us in the local elections...Vague and empty promises...Photo of candidate at a charity that sprung from national government action/inaction.
Save that BS for someone who wasn't ripped off by one of your former candidates.
I have a few burner Gmail addresses that are used when there is a requirement to provide an email address and I know it will get abused. All the R-brand stuff got put in the dustbin, all the D-brand stuff got delivered to the Inbox.
As for the political comments posted here... Do you want the D-brand or the R-brand on the hand that steals the money from your pocket?
There is no option to avoid the hand in the pocket, you only get to decide which marketing message you like better.
In both the 2016, and 2020 elections, these pages reported research that Google was biasing search to favor the D nominee. And I was present at a TGIF (attended by a substantial % of G workers) in 2015 when a director bragged about changing the election results in a Central American country.
It takes a "Some animals are more equal than others" kind of brazenness to claim that concerns of Republicans that they are getting unequal treatment regarding these filters.
Without reading the details of the proposed bill (something which usually takes a JD & access to the Federal Register to decode anyway), the description sounds like they are wanting to require that campaign-related email requires an opt-out. An ugly, transparently self-serving bill? Certainly. But G in particular has no valid claim of neutrality, so these untraceable in-kind donations must be stopped if there is to be any hope of free and fair elections.
The question that I have is: will the opt out actually work? I've got one company whose emails come through no matter how many filters I try to slap on it. (And yes, I only use gmail for work.)
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