If you want a real eye opening experience (or just have a morbid curiosity) - sign up for Democratic/Republican donation lists via a throw away email address and read the material you get sent by PACs begging for donations. It's disgustingly manipulative what these organizations do.
What pisses me off the most is that basically none of the dem lists do anything but ask for money. No calls to action/call your senator/etc. Just people trying to get paid.
(Contrast to Sanders, who, especially as the pandemic started, often guided people to give money to other causes. But even for his list I feel like there was an opportunity for coordinated action on many things that was lost)
What’s the point of coordinated channels of supporters if it’s just to get money? I’m not that interested in subsidizing consulting firms and adtech thank you
I just searched my gmail for "democrat" and the 2 of the 5 most recent emails had calls to action in them and 4 were asking for donations. This includes the most recent email I have from Joe Biden which had both.
All of my elected officials have an official mailing list for constituents which separates out their calls to action on government matters from their fundraising, campaigning, etc. This includes Brian Fitzpatrick, who is a Republican. I prefer it that way so I can unsubscribe from donation requests and still get the other.
Seems like you signed up for fundraising mailing lists and then were surprised they were focused on fundraising. Try signing up for the other lists.
I'm sorry, I don't believe that it's my responsibility to figure this out myself. The campaigns are the ones collecting my info and collecting stuff! Maybe the politicians should be perhaps using their connections to people who gave some money to actually spark mass movements instead of just trying to justify their staff's existence.
I didn't go "sign up" for a fundraising email, I donated to a campaign, and then my email got shopped around to a bunch of other fundraising lists.
Let's not even get into massive fundraising pushes that happen for absolutely dead-on-arrival campaigns like the kentucky senate race. Just pure money grabs...
I would guess it's the other way around, and lists that are just trying to rake in cash are much more likely to get your email because they're more willing to use shady acquisition tactics.
> It's not well known that the (US) CAN-SPAM act does not apply to political and religious organizations.
This is because the politicians in office at the time of writing the "CAN-SPAM" act explicitly wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes. As to why religious orgs. also got included, I don't remember -- one wonders if it was simply to obscure the blatant "we are making ourselves above this law" look for exempting themselves from the law.
They (the politicians that time) did the same thing with the "Do Not Call" phone number list, politicians wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes, and then added an exemption for charity orgs. to the law as well.
Google gmail spam algo is heavily trained by users pressing the spam button. Do spammy things , get marked spam by joe average and do it enough and your emails are marked spam, no explicit action required. It also means that most political email is marked as spam.
I find it to be fairly awful actually. I've noticed over time it's just become what feels like a 5-position slider. I'm hesitant to mark Spam messages as Spam, because I'll immediately start getting a % of legit messages sent to spam. Un mark one of those, and suddenly I'm getting spam again.
> Pichai said “there is nothing in the algorithm that has to do with political ideology”
That’s an interesting non-denial: he never actually says the spam algorithm isn’t biased against conservatives. There could well be a bias, because many ML systems have unintended biases. Google could easily answer the question. It’d probably take an hour max to write and run the mapreduce or whatever they use now.
I'd be very surprised if democratic party emails don't also frequently get marked as spam. I somehow ended up on their list despite not even living in the US, and it was a complete nightmare to get off of it because the unsubscribe link only worked for a specific campaign. I've marked hundreds of their emails as spam by now, and it's entirely their own fault.
I've somehow gotten on mailing lists from candidates and politicians from both major parties over the past several years, and many of them did not seem to respect when I try to unsubscribe, which leads to me marking them as spam. Assuming that I'm not the only one suffering from not respecting my wishes to unsubscribe from lists I never signed up for, I would have to imagine that with enough frustrated recipients making the messages as spam, the algorithm infers that all of the messages from the list are spam. This wouldn't even require the algorithm to even recognize that the messages are political, let alone infer the ideology; I did the same thing with emails trying to sell me sunglasses.
What I find ironic about google's position is they believe implicit unconscious bias permeates all of society, except when it comes to their programmers who are clearly majority democrat....
It should not be ironic, because Google has a history of seeing itself above any flaws, and as the Arbiter of Truth
The algorithm wouldn’t have a bias vs conservatives because it doesn’t include semantic meaning, but it could have a bias vs methods used by this conservative. Which really just comes down on whoever is generating those emails.
I don't know if it does or doesn't, but Republicans and Democrats use different keywords, not just semantics. For example, 'law and order', 'police reform', etc. It's certainly possible for ML to pick up a bias in the presence of such differences.
They also quote each other, without context it’s just word choice not the message. Considering messages are already tailored to different kinds of voters, spam algorithms are just another part of messaging.
What organizations are you thinking of? I'm not an expert in the area, and ones I know of are ActBlue that works only with Democrats, and WinRed which is the Republican clone.
Yep. It's great that whoever in New Anystate's 13th congressional district is taking on Big Whatever, but I have no connection to the person, place, or issue. You may not have money and please go away.
Better yet, if you absolutely want to force someone to abandon their email you can sign them up with donations. Political campaigners are the best harassment money can buy.
Professional political fundraising is a thing. It's an industry. They sell their services to issue oriented NGO's, too.
As far as I know (2 decades ago i had some contact with that world) they're all that slimy. "dark patterns" like this are the least of it, they fake addresses, steal data from customers, fiddle accounting, etc etc. "It's not a crime until you've been caught."
The positions are called DevOps if you want to poke around at some job descriptions of the people who do this for a living. Outside of the egregious examples that get spread around (and if you’re not politically active might be the only ones you know so keep that in mind) it’s a pretty boring job. Clicking around Salesforce, lots of mailmerges, event planning, reporting, and the financial logistics of people with conditions on their money or people who donate through foundations or donor advised funds.
Credit/digital payments as a whole are backwards. Currently, you give your payment information to some organization, and they can bill you whatever they want and you hope they don't take your money indefinitely. If someone takes your money and you try to get it back, your own credit is on the line when you try to resolve it. Even with chargebacks, your credit card company may only accept so many.
Instead it should be client-controlled, they give you some sort of payment token that you can pay or not pay. For recurring payments, you could trust a particular vendor you like (and then untrust them at will), but it should entirely be under your control. Unsubscription should be automatically handled by this as well.
I know you are being sarcastic; but I think this probably affects all political teams who otherwise would be giving up a significant advantage by not at least hiring some firm at arms length to try to fleece their supporters this way. I think it’s even better for everyone to ban it so that everyone doesn’t get trapped in this race to the bottom.
DJT’s campaign made heavy use of this tactic but AFAIK no other major political candidate has done this. Unsurprisingly DJT’s donations had much higher chargeback rates.
Most politicians don’t want to anger their biggest supporters. DJT didn’t seem to care.
You joke but this is a real problem that prevents us from clearing out our political tech debt so to speak. If you expect worse outcomes from the loss of political territory than the harm from whatever you want to change then it doesn’t happen. And you have to constantly deal with both sides trying to change things that they know in advance disproportionately affect their opponents.
Until our political system “stabilizes” where high-profile elections aren’t won by teeny tiny margins or determined by turnout and voting access more than the real preferences of the population this is going to be an issue.
This is just a politics-oriented variant of a "growth hack." It's not about the ideology, it's about roping people into giving them money they didn't really intended to spend, with what is basically adding a subscription service they hope you don't notice.
I think you're misunderstanding how bad the general state of political fundraising in the US is. Just over the past week, I've gotten:
* An email titled "watch our video [not asking for money]" which links to a request for money
* _two_ people - one from each side of the aisle - trying to gaslight me into donating "again" since I've purportedly already joined their campaign
* a fake survey where every prompt is some variation on "Did you know how vile those guys are?" and the only response options are "Yes, they suck" or "No, but I know now".
* an email written to sound like a personal letter, assuring me that some state legislators will be unjustly imprisoned if I don't sign a petition, but reveals upon clicking into the petition that they also need to collect $2,084 by midnight. (I only personally need to send $16 - it's "today's most popular amount!")
And I've only ever made a single political donation from my current email! I don't think it's partisan at all to say the status quo isn't okay here.
Let's not forget "official poll" emails that aren't. I have no way of knowing if I am being polled or solicited. Hence, my voice is now excluded from political polls.
I think the 1-click donations should also be banned. I recall getting a solicitation from one of the two major parties with a “click here to support Foo” button in the email.
Fine print at the bottom revealed that if you had a payment method on file that click would, without further action, donate some set amount to candidate Foo. (I don’t recall the details of the amount.)
I’m fine with fundraising, but “click here to support” I expect to land me on a web page where I could read more and make a fully informed decision to donate, not to take money out of my account from the email click.
That's incredibly shady. I bet I've made an informed choice to donate to a candidate or two because I've fat fingered a link while reading email on my phone.
However I have a problem with pretty much all FEC regulations because I am a free speech absolutist, and I view these "campaign finance laws" at minimum to be a spiritual infringement on the principle of free expression even if they pass legal challenges.
They also rares accomplish their stated goals and often end up being an advantage to the incumbents in power who have access to more "free media" as part of their official duties...
Perhaps banning recurring donations is the better idea*?.
I can sit here for five minutes and think up several ways to achieve the exact same thing some arbitrary UI element (prechecked checkbox) achieves. Don't even need a checkbox. Just change the terms.
I don’t think banning recurring donations would breach citizens United, but I’m not a lawyer.
To my understanding, Citizens United controls what you can do with your money. It does not cover what arrangements campaigns can have to charge you money. You can set a reminder to donate monthly if you want, but that doesn’t mean that PACs can necessarily charge you monthly, in my opinion.
Similarly, the courts have held that the FEC can’t control what candidates say, which is good. But the FEC can force political adverts to make it clear who paid for it, which is also good.
CU has nothing to so with donation rules for campaign committees; like Buckley v. Valeo before it, it deals with independent expenditures by entities which are not and do not coordinate with campaign committees.
Can we not pretend that laws have to use the most surface level definition of things? It’s a silly straw man attack and isn’t how laws are (usually) written.
