7 ms·

Gmail sends far more emails from conservatives to spam: study

19 points by ccleve 5y ago

mikojan 5y ago
Well maybe that's because it is
IceMetalPunk 5y ago
Let's be clear about this: there may be a good reason for that. Most spam filters use some sort of Bayesian analysis to determine what's spam. Whenever someone marks an email as spam, it updates its probability mapping based on the email's content. In other words, if gmail is filtering more conservative emails as spam, it's because gmail users are marking more conservative emails as spam and teaching it to do that. In other words, the bias is that gmail users don't want conservative emails more than they don't want liberal emails. Which, means, hey, if you're a conservative who doesn't want your email filtered out as spam in gmail, maybe consider saying things in your message that aren't annoying to gmail users instead of blaming The Algorithm
- Bostonian 5y ago
  Ideally, shouldn't this be customized to the user, so that liberal users get conservative messages sent to spam and conservative users get liberal messages sent to spam?
  - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
    The problem with that is an individual user doesn't generally mark enough things as spam to give the filter enough data to perform well on. It's the aggregation of every user's spam-marking that provides a large enough data set to make good predictions. If they switched to individual spam filters, a lot more spam would make its way into users' inboxes.
    - bckr 5y ago
      Not necessarily. After a bit of customer-specific training data, users could be grouped into cohorts.
      - chki 5y ago
        So to give an extreme example: there would be one cohort of unsuspecting elderly people that can't recognize spam and therefore still get a lot of Spam?
        bckr 5y ago
        Yea,that would be a weakness of the approach for sure.
      - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
        So, train a classifier to create an embedding of Spam Types, then train a different Bayesian filter for each Spam Type with only the data from the users in that type class? I mean, yeah, I guess that would be possible, but is it a good idea? Echo chambers tend not to be productive, so if the choice is "get rid of stuff that most people think is bad" or "get rid of stuff that most people who agree with you think is bad" -- and if it takes much more work to do the latter -- I can't justify putting in that work. It's counter-productive, and all to satisfy peoples' desires to hear what they already think.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    Ideally users should get what they sign up to receive and nothing more.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    It's way too expensive to have individual models for these things.
- ccleve 5y ago
  Except that the study found that yahoo and outlook leaned the other way, except not as much. Gmail was uniquely left-leaning.
  - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
    Which I addressed: it's based on the user base. There's some sampling bias to consider here, in that the demographics of people who use Yahoo, who use Outlook, and who use Gmail are not equivalent.
    - nickff 5y ago
      Your explanation seems purely speculative; do you have any reason to believe that it's actually true?
      - mgkimsal 5y ago
        Experience, perhaps? That maps partially to my own experience. The majority of folks I know who identify as 'conservative' are older, less tech savvy, and tend to use whatever they had set up a long time ago. @AOL? @Yahoo? @MSN? If it's working, they'll just keep using it. A few I know have made a transition to gmail, I think at the behest of younger children (as in, they may have set it up for them during a holiday visit, etc). But in my own life, with the majority of conservatives I know where I also know their primary email, it's not gmail.
        hotpotamus 5y ago
        My experience agrees with you and I just realized that you can roughly guess someone's age by their email domain. As a Millenial, I've used gmail for going on 20 years, but I feel like that was more or less the peak of email - I don't know that Gen Z uses anything else. My guess would be they moved onto social media and while they probably have emails, it was never their primary method of online communication.
        5y ago
- fukyounig2 5y ago
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  The implicit assumption here is that 100% of the training data comes from regular Gmail users and it didn't start off with any seed data provided by Google employees.
  - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
    Not at all. It doesn't have to be 100% of the data, it just has to be enough of the data that it influences the filter's decisions toward one direction over another. And since GMail has been in existence for 18 years and has a massive user base, I would be extraordinarily shocked if Google's initial seed training set isn't totally overshadowed by user-supplied data by now.
  - labrador 5y ago
    It seems fairly useless if we get different results depending on where we start from. That's not what I call learning.
    - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
      To be fair, there would be a difference for awhile, as more training data makes its way into the system. But you're right that an effective machine learning system, or even just an effective Bayesian analysis, would be problematic if it didn't trend towards a the same answer as more data is obtained. And after 18 years and millions of users, yeah, if the initial training data still held any influence over its decisions, it would mean the whole system is broken.
- MandieD 5y ago
  When I contact my senators and representative about literally anything and give them my email for a reply, they end up spamming me constantly with their newsletters bragging about how they're keeping Obama, and now Biden, from being able to get anything done, or how they would like to make the lives of immigrants and young women harder. Howdy, Spam folder. GMail learns a bit more about how much I don't want to hear about the above. (My senators are Cornyn and Cruz, representative is Carter.) Other example: innocuous-looking, apolitical site with a few nice knitting patterns, and the promise of more if you register an account. I used a custom email address just for them in a domain I own. Two weeks later: Newsmax and other far-right stuff to said email address that had never been used for anything else. No, I'm not worried about men calling themselves women and assaulting my unsuspecting daughter in a bathroom. More education of the Spam filter.
  - chki 5y ago
    Sometimes I'm annoyed at the GDPR, especially when implementing it. But this thing just won't happen in Europe anymore, at least from my experience. Especially when writing to your local representative it's unbelievable that they are allowed to start messaging you regularly with their advertisements.
    - Kye 5y ago
      New laws against stuff like this in the US generally have exceptions for politicians, so it wouldn't help.
      - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
        Which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that politicians are the ones making the laws............................................ (I wasn't sure how many ellipses would convey my exhaustion accurately, so I used them all.)
  - Kye 5y ago
    >> "they would like to make the lives of immigrants and young women harder" Attacking us queerfolk seems to have come back into fashion, too. And, bizarrely, furries. I wish the "Beto is a furry" campaign had been a fluke. Wishing it would go away is the one thing furries across the political spectrum agree on. At this rate, Nancy Pelosi will buy a knockoff fursuit off AliExpress in solidarity.
nabla9 5y ago
... During US Election 2020 Conservative scam PACs were huge issue in 2020. Bogus groups masquerading as legitimate political action committees. They collected the money for a candidate or cause and then pocketed the cash instead of giving it to the cause or the candidate. Several of these scammers have already gone to prison.
wl 5y ago
My single data point as someone who doesn't sign up for political emails: I get FAR, FAR more conservative spam than liberal.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  Is it the bullying kind, talking down to you to try to get you to donate by shaming you? Or telling you Don Jr is going to be showing his dad this week's top donor list, and he's embarrassed that he can't share your name with his dad. He's embarrassed because he already promised his dad that you were going to donate - don't embarrass Don Jr by not donating right now! I really have no idea how these pleas can appeal to anyone.
  - wl 5y ago
    Nah, more like screeds about how liberals are out to destroy your 401k or how Joe Biden is destroying America.
    - MandieD 5y ago
      Oh, that's nice. I get ones that are more "concerned mom" targeted about what various elements of "The Left" wish to do to children.
      - ihumanable 5y ago
        I get spam from both sides of the spectrum. I find it amusing that right-spam is mostly "Democrats are going to destroy your family!" or "Don't let trump down!" and left-spam is mostly "We are so scared because {bad thing has or will happen}" I myself am further to the left than the dems, so I vote with them. I find their messaging so spectacularly weak. They are always trying to guilt people into supporting through this narrative of "we are weak and about to get crushed, save us." I find it so off putting, I wish we had other viable parties and could get rid of FPTP so we don't have to constantly select between these two.
        deleted 5y ago
spzb 5y ago
I've been getting regular spam from the Democratic party for years despite never being a US voter or resident (I've only ever been there as a tourist, once). They also address me as Carol despite that not being my name and not being part of my email address. God only knows how I ended up on their list.
- dtagames 4y ago
  Many years ago, before we had the internet, I started to get paper mail addressed to Yevrus and my last name. I thought it was a strange name. Certainly not one we have in the family. Anyway, this Yevrus character had really great credit apparently. He was getting big credit card offers in the mail every day and all kinds of catalogs for stuff I never bought or was interested in. It took me months to figure out that Yevrus is SURVEY backwards! The "profile" had come from a survey (not one I took!) and that word wound up in the first name field.
jeffbee 5y ago
Other supportable conclusions include that conservatives are actually spammers. Aside from that logical error, this paper makes a huge number of unsupported assumptions. The biggest error they make is assuming that the contents of the spam folder are representative of spam. In reality the overwhelming majority of what Gmail thinks is spam is reject at SMTP time and doesn't get stored in the user's mailbox at all.
mike503 5y ago
The GOP emails I see are very Trumpesque. I entered one “contest” once and I get over 11 emails a day from multiple GOP lists, the From: is everyone from Trump himself to radio personalities and a million variations of patriots and America first crap. Grammar and Random Capitalization constantly (“the LIBERALS want to KILL You”), constant grifting and 5x match offers, fake embedded email responses (from: Donald trump, subject: missing donor. Body: “did X not donate yet?”) it’s absolutely ludicrous. I added a filter to not send to spam and archive directly to a specific label just to see how crazy it gets. It should be considered fraud and bending some sort of finance laws to be sending out that kind of stuff. On a funny related point, Bernie has almost the same email format (could use same provider, never checked) - his subject lines are insanely long but he’s always very personable and spot on to his meme about “once again I’m asking if you could donate” but it’s never about him. It’s always for something charitable, not about his own campaign. The emails are composed well and not THREATENING random words capitalized to scare you. It’s a night and day difference. It’s a shame the powers that be continue to keep him from advancing any further. He’s truly a man of the people.
- mike503 5y ago
  Second comment - it’s likely that GOP get to spam more because users click spam on them because of their tactics. They simply don’t recognize the sender (because they change them often, at least with my personal experience mentioned above)
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Why is this flagged. Maybe because it is political and/or incorrect. Nevertheless the Gmail spam filter is definitely worth discussing. I have a friend who registered his surname as a domain so he does not have to use Gmail. Every email he sends from his personal email to a Gmail account goes to spam. Selecting and clicking "Not spam" has no effect. The mail keeps going to the Spam folder. AFAICT, the user's choice is being overridden. Google filters are beyond user control. That's a problem, irrespective of whether the premise here is political and/or incorrect.

19 points by ccleve 5y ago

Well maybe that's because it is

Let's be clear about this: there may be a good reason for that. Most spam filters use some sort of Bayesian analysis to determine what's spam. Whenever someone marks an email as spam, it updates its probability mapping based on the email's content. In other words, if gmail is filtering more conservative emails as spam, it's because gmail users are marking more conservative emails as spam and teaching it to do that. In other words, the bias is that gmail users don't want conservative emails more than they don't want liberal emails. Which, means, hey, if you're a conservative who doesn't want your email filtered out as spam in gmail, maybe consider saying things in your message that aren't annoying to gmail users instead of blaming The Algorithm

Bostonian 5y ago
Ideally, shouldn't this be customized to the user, so that liberal users get conservative messages sent to spam and conservative users get liberal messages sent to spam?
- IceMetalPunk 5y ago
  The problem with that is an individual user doesn't generally mark enough things as spam to give the filter enough data to perform well on. It's the aggregation of every user's spam-marking that provides a large enough data set to make good predictions. If they switched to individual spam filters, a lot more spam would make its way into users' inboxes.
  - bckr 5y ago
    Not necessarily. After a bit of customer-specific training data, users could be grouped into cohorts.
    - chki 5y ago
      So to give an extreme example: there would be one cohort of unsuspecting elderly people that can't recognize spam and therefore still get a lot of Spam?
      - bckr 5y ago
        Yea,that would be a weakness of the approach for sure.
    - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
      So, train a classifier to create an embedding of Spam Types, then train a different Bayesian filter for each Spam Type with only the data from the users in that type class? I mean, yeah, I guess that would be possible, but is it a good idea? Echo chambers tend not to be productive, so if the choice is "get rid of stuff that most people think is bad" or "get rid of stuff that most people who agree with you think is bad" -- and if it takes much more work to do the latter -- I can't justify putting in that work. It's counter-productive, and all to satisfy peoples' desires to hear what they already think.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  Ideally users should get what they sign up to receive and nothing more.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It's way too expensive to have individual models for these things.
ccleve 5y ago
Except that the study found that yahoo and outlook leaned the other way, except not as much. Gmail was uniquely left-leaning.
- IceMetalPunk 5y ago
  Which I addressed: it's based on the user base. There's some sampling bias to consider here, in that the demographics of people who use Yahoo, who use Outlook, and who use Gmail are not equivalent.
  - nickff 5y ago
    Your explanation seems purely speculative; do you have any reason to believe that it's actually true?
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      Experience, perhaps? That maps partially to my own experience. The majority of folks I know who identify as 'conservative' are older, less tech savvy, and tend to use whatever they had set up a long time ago. @AOL? @Yahoo? @MSN? If it's working, they'll just keep using it. A few I know have made a transition to gmail, I think at the behest of younger children (as in, they may have set it up for them during a holiday visit, etc). But in my own life, with the majority of conservatives I know where I also know their primary email, it's not gmail.
      - hotpotamus 5y ago
        My experience agrees with you and I just realized that you can roughly guess someone's age by their email domain. As a Millenial, I've used gmail for going on 20 years, but I feel like that was more or less the peak of email - I don't know that Gen Z uses anything else. My guess would be they moved onto social media and while they probably have emails, it was never their primary method of online communication.
        5y ago
fukyounig2 5y ago
diebeforei485 5y ago
The implicit assumption here is that 100% of the training data comes from regular Gmail users and it didn't start off with any seed data provided by Google employees.
- IceMetalPunk 5y ago
  Not at all. It doesn't have to be 100% of the data, it just has to be enough of the data that it influences the filter's decisions toward one direction over another. And since GMail has been in existence for 18 years and has a massive user base, I would be extraordinarily shocked if Google's initial seed training set isn't totally overshadowed by user-supplied data by now.
- labrador 5y ago
  It seems fairly useless if we get different results depending on where we start from. That's not what I call learning.
  - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
    To be fair, there would be a difference for awhile, as more training data makes its way into the system. But you're right that an effective machine learning system, or even just an effective Bayesian analysis, would be problematic if it didn't trend towards a the same answer as more data is obtained. And after 18 years and millions of users, yeah, if the initial training data still held any influence over its decisions, it would mean the whole system is broken.
MandieD 5y ago
When I contact my senators and representative about literally anything and give them my email for a reply, they end up spamming me constantly with their newsletters bragging about how they're keeping Obama, and now Biden, from being able to get anything done, or how they would like to make the lives of immigrants and young women harder. Howdy, Spam folder. GMail learns a bit more about how much I don't want to hear about the above. (My senators are Cornyn and Cruz, representative is Carter.) Other example: innocuous-looking, apolitical site with a few nice knitting patterns, and the promise of more if you register an account. I used a custom email address just for them in a domain I own. Two weeks later: Newsmax and other far-right stuff to said email address that had never been used for anything else. No, I'm not worried about men calling themselves women and assaulting my unsuspecting daughter in a bathroom. More education of the Spam filter.
- chki 5y ago
  Sometimes I'm annoyed at the GDPR, especially when implementing it. But this thing just won't happen in Europe anymore, at least from my experience. Especially when writing to your local representative it's unbelievable that they are allowed to start messaging you regularly with their advertisements.
  - Kye 5y ago
    New laws against stuff like this in the US generally have exceptions for politicians, so it wouldn't help.
    - IceMetalPunk 5y ago
      Which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that politicians are the ones making the laws............................................ (I wasn't sure how many ellipses would convey my exhaustion accurately, so I used them all.)
- Kye 5y ago
  >> "they would like to make the lives of immigrants and young women harder" Attacking us queerfolk seems to have come back into fashion, too. And, bizarrely, furries. I wish the "Beto is a furry" campaign had been a fluke. Wishing it would go away is the one thing furries across the political spectrum agree on. At this rate, Nancy Pelosi will buy a knockoff fursuit off AliExpress in solidarity.

nabla9 5y ago

... During US Election 2020 Conservative scam PACs were huge issue in 2020. Bogus groups masquerading as legitimate political action committees. They collected the money for a candidate or cause and then pocketed the cash instead of giving it to the cause or the candidate. Several of these scammers have already gone to prison.

wl 5y ago

My single data point as someone who doesn't sign up for political emails: I get FAR, FAR more conservative spam than liberal.

mgkimsal 5y ago
Is it the bullying kind, talking down to you to try to get you to donate by shaming you? Or telling you Don Jr is going to be showing his dad this week's top donor list, and he's embarrassed that he can't share your name with his dad. He's embarrassed because he already promised his dad that you were going to donate - don't embarrass Don Jr by not donating right now! I really have no idea how these pleas can appeal to anyone.
- wl 5y ago
  Nah, more like screeds about how liberals are out to destroy your 401k or how Joe Biden is destroying America.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    Oh, that's nice. I get ones that are more "concerned mom" targeted about what various elements of "The Left" wish to do to children.
    - ihumanable 5y ago
      I get spam from both sides of the spectrum. I find it amusing that right-spam is mostly "Democrats are going to destroy your family!" or "Don't let trump down!" and left-spam is mostly "We are so scared because {bad thing has or will happen}" I myself am further to the left than the dems, so I vote with them. I find their messaging so spectacularly weak. They are always trying to guilt people into supporting through this narrative of "we are weak and about to get crushed, save us." I find it so off putting, I wish we had other viable parties and could get rid of FPTP so we don't have to constantly select between these two.
      - deleted 5y ago

spzb 5y ago

I've been getting regular spam from the Democratic party for years despite never being a US voter or resident (I've only ever been there as a tourist, once). They also address me as Carol despite that not being my name and not being part of my email address. God only knows how I ended up on their list.

dtagames 4y ago
Many years ago, before we had the internet, I started to get paper mail addressed to Yevrus and my last name. I thought it was a strange name. Certainly not one we have in the family. Anyway, this Yevrus character had really great credit apparently. He was getting big credit card offers in the mail every day and all kinds of catalogs for stuff I never bought or was interested in. It took me months to figure out that Yevrus is SURVEY backwards! The "profile" had come from a survey (not one I took!) and that word wound up in the first name field.

jeffbee 5y ago

Other supportable conclusions include that conservatives are actually spammers. Aside from that logical error, this paper makes a huge number of unsupported assumptions. The biggest error they make is assuming that the contents of the spam folder are representative of spam. In reality the overwhelming majority of what Gmail thinks is spam is reject at SMTP time and doesn't get stored in the user's mailbox at all.

mike503 5y ago

The GOP emails I see are very Trumpesque. I entered one “contest” once and I get over 11 emails a day from multiple GOP lists, the From: is everyone from Trump himself to radio personalities and a million variations of patriots and America first crap. Grammar and Random Capitalization constantly (“the LIBERALS want to KILL You”), constant grifting and 5x match offers, fake embedded email responses (from: Donald trump, subject: missing donor. Body: “did X not donate yet?”) it’s absolutely ludicrous. I added a filter to not send to spam and archive directly to a specific label just to see how crazy it gets. It should be considered fraud and bending some sort of finance laws to be sending out that kind of stuff. On a funny related point, Bernie has almost the same email format (could use same provider, never checked) - his subject lines are insanely long but he’s always very personable and spot on to his meme about “once again I’m asking if you could donate” but it’s never about him. It’s always for something charitable, not about his own campaign. The emails are composed well and not THREATENING random words capitalized to scare you. It’s a night and day difference. It’s a shame the powers that be continue to keep him from advancing any further. He’s truly a man of the people.

mike503 5y ago
Second comment - it’s likely that GOP get to spam more because users click spam on them because of their tactics. They simply don’t recognize the sender (because they change them often, at least with my personal experience mentioned above)

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Why is this flagged. Maybe because it is political and/or incorrect. Nevertheless the Gmail spam filter is definitely worth discussing. I have a friend who registered his surname as a domain so he does not have to use Gmail. Every email he sends from his personal email to a Gmail account goes to spam. Selecting and clicking "Not spam" has no effect. The mail keeps going to the Spam folder. AFAICT, the user's choice is being overridden. Google filters are beyond user control. That's a problem, irrespective of whether the premise here is political and/or incorrect.