To those of you who aren't already aware of it, Google has asked the Federal Election Commission
for an opinion about Google's 'pilot project' to allow political candidates and campaigns to
bypass Google's spam filters.
This was just published by the FEC to the public yesterday, because Friday is when they publish
their "what happened this week" notice to the public. Here is the info:
https://www.fec.gov/updates/week-of-july-4-8-2022/
This is something that has been fascinating to me, starting back at the
run-up to the 2020 election.
As some of you know, we do a monthly anti-spam efficacy test (this month
marks our 200th consecutive test) of all of the major enterprise-focused
products and some smaller players as well. Google, because it doesn't
sell anti-spam service to enterprises other than bundled as part of
their collaboration tools, isn't part of our testbed anymore (during the
Postini era, it was of course).
Anyway, the data we collected about political mass emails changed
dramatically between 2016 and 2020. We saw lots of permission-based
mailings during the 2016 season. But for 2020 (actually even a bit
earlier), something changed and both parties were cross-pollinating
lists between candidates and dropping the requirement for permission
before adding you to a fundraising list. It can be seen that if you
donated directly to a Democrat OR Republican in your state, your address
would soon show up, without opting in, in fundraising appeals from
candidates from the same party all of the country.
You don't have to donate money: This also comes from providing your
email address to a candidate or office-holder's own web site (such as
while submitting a comment). We have not observed any leakage of
addresses from the official web sites provided by the House.GOV and
Senate.GOV teams to current office-holders.
These unsolicited email campaigns are all very easy to unsubscribe from,
but the seeding is happening in the back end, and we observe that there
is no way to stop the campaigns from continuing to share email addresses
with each other--even after unsubscribe requests. Moving from fact to
speculation, I believe that the organizations and candidates are
treating these lists as valuable property to be deployed where needed,
while the unsubscribe requests aren't propagated to the original database.
Anyway, the end result is a bunch of unsolicited commercial email that
many would consider spam showing up in our testing.
What is fascinating is that different anti-spam vendors have VERY
different behaviors around this.
The observed behavior is that about half fall into the "this is all
spam," marking more-or-less all of the unsolicited political fundraising
traffic as spam or suspected spam. Most of the others seem to be
treading very, very carefully and are not delivering a spam verdict on
any of it. And there are a few that are reacting, I am guessing, to
customer complaints which means that only the highest volume senders are
being marked as spam, while low-volume senders get through.
While "Big Tech" has been accused of having a liberal bias, the reality
is that the choice to mark political fund raising appeals as spam or not
does not seem to be focused on one party or the other: there is NO
pattern that indicates that the Rs or the Ds are being targeted any
differently.
What is observably true is that some anti-spam companies have
implemented things so that that political fund raising IS NOT CONSIDERED
an exception to the normally accepted "adding someone to a commercial
bulk email list without their opt-in means you're a spammer, no matter
what you're saying" rule---I cannot say whether this was an explicit
decision or not, because I don't have visibility into how they make
these decisions.
At the same, it is observably true that others HAVE DECIDED to give all
of this type of commercial bulk unsolicited email a pass. In other
words, what we see is that some vendors are behaving like "no matter how
bad you are, we don't want anyone to accuse us of blocking this traffic,
even if it falls into all of the normal definition of spam." This is
something that has been confirmed to me by developers from two different
companies.
Passing now from facts to opinion, my guess is that the anti-spam
companies---which are actually from all over the world, as most of you
should know---have seen the showboating and accusations of "liberal
bias" from the Republican establishment and would rather tread on the
side of "let more spam through" rather than be held up as an
American/Chinese/Taiwanese/European company that is somehow on the side
of one party or the other. Given that the political fundraising
spammers are responding to opt-outs, it's not a particularly horrible
problem. But it is an interesting (to me at least) exercise in
algorithm control. If I was a lawyer interested in the Constitutional
aspects, I might call this "self-censorship," but I am not a lawyer.
By the way, if anyone is interested: the leader in the political
fundraising is "donaldjtrump.com" which in our last test sent out, in a
10-day-period, 66 UNIQUE emails to the same "never asked to be added to
this list" address, all asking for money. That's more than 6 a day.
The number two was "giffords.org" which sent out 4 messages during that
same period. (Insert note about how mass shootings, Giffords' major
interest, were all front page news during those ten days.)
jms
--
Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494
j...@opus1.com http://www.opus1.com/jms
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