3 ms·
Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020
- IceMetalPunk 4y agoSomeone posted a more casual article describing this not too long ago; I'll summarize the same response I had to that here. Spam filters learn what counts as spam based on what its users, en masse, mark as spam. If a filter is blocking a specific party's emails more, it's because the user base marks that party's emails as spam more. In other words, the spam filter is doing its job: its users have said they, in general, don't want that party's emails, so it blocks them. The difference in seeming bias across platforms is because there's a difference in demographics in the user bases of different services (markedly, for instance, by age). In other words: spam filters block based on what their users don't want to see, so if you don't want your political emails blocked, stop sending shit the users don't want to see.
- PaulHoule 4y agoI gave money to a democratic candidate a few years ago and regret it now because, even though I have unsubscribed from every list, my email periodically gets sold. Last month I started getting several emails a day from Beto O'Rourke, what was ironic was that these messages cited the bad response they were getting from their fundraising campaign. My understanding is that you can cause more deliverability problems for e-mail marketers if you could cause messages to bounce instead of just filing complaints. If it wasn't going to cause more deliverability problems than I already have I'd love to switch to a custom email server that bounces crap like that.