4 ms·

Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (W

Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (Who would've thought continuosly emailing people who click unsubscribe on your emails who then start reporting as spam would get you put on spam lists). Now political parties (and some bulk providers) have special tools to bypass rejection with some providers as a compromise.

immibis 2y ago
I'm actually amazed at this because it seems to be the first time he Democrats are actually taking advantage of all the loopholes the Republicans made, rather than trying to take the high road.
- greycol 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure that most marketeers correlate with the "it's fine to send lots of useless crap to people for $x justifcation" philosphy. You pick a Marketeer(D) or Marketeer(R) and they'll be happy to use whatever legal tools they can use in that vein (Sure there's good ones but they're rarer). I'd classify it as a failing in their world view rather than a moral one, not to say there aren't immoral marketeers.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's not the first time, you're just patronizing the news outlets that tell you when the Republicans do something untoward but not when the Democrats do instead of the ones that do the opposite. Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.
  - dccoolgai 2y ago
    No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Gerrymandering is entirely bipartisan: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-maps-ny-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma... https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerrymandering-independent-commission-553a08590ac29e0dd8115073663e8f2a https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman... There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one: https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate
      - dccoolgai 2y ago
        You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level. For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore. Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.
        kortilla 2y ago
        This is a thread about “the first time Democrats used a loophole”. That’s clearly wrong and for some reason you’re comparing them to republicans as if ratios change absolutes.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > the cherry picked example of CA California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population. > overrepresention of Republicans That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs. And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote. > this is from Citizens United That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower. Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media. Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
- monksy 2y ago
  ActBlue and WinRed both use these tactics and have been doing it for a while. They're at fraud/scammer levels at this point. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-donations-seniors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-don...
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  I received well over 1000 SMS messages in 2020 from the Biden campaign. Replying 'STOP' worked... for that one number but since they were using a huge army of volunteers to SMS out messages, asking them to stop was pointless as there was a seemingly endless number of others sending out messages. Legal or not, it wasn't ethical. It only started after I updated my voter registration because I moved between counties. The online form had telephone number as a mandatory field but I didn't realize that would be released to political campaigns. Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.
  - y-curious 2y ago
    Just respond telling them "thanks, but I'm voting by word of mouth this year." Never heard from them since.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This is incorrect to my knowledge. The free pass to spam political email was an explicit carve out in the can spam act, which lets them not comply with the same regulations everyone else has to. What you’re talking about is something much more recent, about what Google does on the receiving side of email with their spam filters. That was about Google’s compliance with an order from the federal election commission because their spam filters had biases that act like campaign financing. Google’s solution had bipartisan support among the commissioners as I recall.
- greycol 2y ago
  I don't think anything I said is in conflict with what you've said, I'm pointing out one of the reasons the poster might still be getting spam from a mail he's reported as spam. The can spam act was more about senders requirements than email platform providers requirements for recieving (i.e. spam filtering). Yes the republicans were more affected by the spam filters but both researchers and internal communication indicated it wasn't because of any deliberate bias (just that republican emails were more likely to be like spam as far as an algorithmic interpratation goes (pure uncharitable conjecture: perhaps because one party was more likely to include a unsubscribe button even if it wasn't required by the can spam act and thus weren't reported as spam as much). Because of this they sued and google reportedly made more tools available or atleast publicised existing tools to both republicans and democrats to exclude their email campaigns from getting caught in the spam filters (tools that have also been made available to some of the larger more legitimate bulk email providers).

immibis 2y ago

I'm actually amazed at this because it seems to be the first time he Democrats are actually taking advantage of all the loopholes the Republicans made, rather than trying to take the high road.

greycol 2y ago
I'm pretty sure that most marketeers correlate with the "it's fine to send lots of useless crap to people for $x justifcation" philosphy. You pick a Marketeer(D) or Marketeer(R) and they'll be happy to use whatever legal tools they can use in that vein (Sure there's good ones but they're rarer). I'd classify it as a failing in their world view rather than a moral one, not to say there aren't immoral marketeers.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's not the first time, you're just patronizing the news outlets that tell you when the Republicans do something untoward but not when the Democrats do instead of the ones that do the opposite. Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.
- dccoolgai 2y ago
  No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Gerrymandering is entirely bipartisan: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-maps-ny-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma... https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerrymandering-independent-commission-553a08590ac29e0dd8115073663e8f2a https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman... There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one: https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate
    - dccoolgai 2y ago
      You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level. For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore. Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.
      - kortilla 2y ago
        This is a thread about “the first time Democrats used a loophole”. That’s clearly wrong and for some reason you’re comparing them to republicans as if ratios change absolutes.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > the cherry picked example of CA California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population. > overrepresention of Republicans That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs. And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote. > this is from Citizens United That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower. Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media. Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
monksy 2y ago
ActBlue and WinRed both use these tactics and have been doing it for a while. They're at fraud/scammer levels at this point. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-donations-seniors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-don...
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
I received well over 1000 SMS messages in 2020 from the Biden campaign. Replying 'STOP' worked... for that one number but since they were using a huge army of volunteers to SMS out messages, asking them to stop was pointless as there was a seemingly endless number of others sending out messages. Legal or not, it wasn't ethical. It only started after I updated my voter registration because I moved between counties. The online form had telephone number as a mandatory field but I didn't realize that would be released to political campaigns. Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.
- y-curious 2y ago
  Just respond telling them "thanks, but I'm voting by word of mouth this year." Never heard from them since.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This is incorrect to my knowledge. The free pass to spam political email was an explicit carve out in the can spam act, which lets them not comply with the same regulations everyone else has to. What you’re talking about is something much more recent, about what Google does on the receiving side of email with their spam filters. That was about Google’s compliance with an order from the federal election commission because their spam filters had biases that act like campaign financing. Google’s solution had bipartisan support among the commissioners as I recall.

greycol 2y ago
I don't think anything I said is in conflict with what you've said, I'm pointing out one of the reasons the poster might still be getting spam from a mail he's reported as spam. The can spam act was more about senders requirements than email platform providers requirements for recieving (i.e. spam filtering). Yes the republicans were more affected by the spam filters but both researchers and internal communication indicated it wasn't because of any deliberate bias (just that republican emails were more likely to be like spam as far as an algorithmic interpratation goes (pure uncharitable conjecture: perhaps because one party was more likely to include a unsubscribe button even if it wasn't required by the can spam act and thus weren't reported as spam as much). Because of this they sued and google reportedly made more tools available or atleast publicised existing tools to both republicans and democrats to exclude their email campaigns from getting caught in the spam filters (tools that have also been made available to some of the larger more legitimate bulk email providers).