Campaign emails will soon bypass Gmail’s spam filter and go straight to your inbox. Democracy doesn’t have to be so annoying.
Google says it’s a pilot program — not used by any other email provider so far — to display campaign emails that some people might want to see. But the program is extremely hostile to most of us, who may be forced to dig up more political spam. Who even asked for this? Why, of course politicians.
Democracy depends on the free flow of information. But in our inboxes and mobile phones, democracy is becoming annoying and dangerous. Our users don’t want to be inundated with unwanted political emails, text messages, and robocalls—and we don’t want to be the target of misinformation and misleading fundraising calls.
Google’s program to help politicians spam you gives us an opportunity to rethink what’s wrong with online campaigning.
“Spam also got into my inbox,” said Ellen L. Weintraub (D), a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission who helps oversee U.S. election campaigns. “The politicians who set the rules have waived many of the rules that might apply,” she told me.
How do we fight back? We need to find ways to make politicians pay special attention to what they do with our inboxes and our data — and what they say when they communicate directly with us — rather than politicians.
A plan only politicians would love
Google is giving politicians an end to bypassing one of our last online sanctuaries: the spam filter that protects Gmail’s 1.5 billion users from spam, scams and malware.
Over the next few weeks, emails from Google’s trial campaigns will start appearing directly in everyone’s Gmail “Main” tab. (This is the same as actual important information like an email from a potential employer or your aunt.) When you open one of these emails for the first time, you’ll see a new gray “unsubscribe” box at the top. But the system means you have to review and click unsubscribe on every email, the senders of which are used to multiplying each election season.
Our users don’t want to be inundated with unwanted political emails, text messages, and robocalls. We also don’t want to be the target of misinformation and misleading fundraising calls.
You’ll only see the unsubscribe box the first time you open these emails — it’ll only show up on the Gmail app or website, not other popular mail apps like Apple’s iPhone Mail.
We don’t yet know how many politicians will get involved or how bad our inboxes will be. Google said its pilot program was bipartisan, but eligible senders were still struggling to meet its special technical criteria.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Google also has some rules for participants that might deter some bad behavior. The worst offenders (like buying millions of email addresses and spamming them all) might not even try to join the program because they can’t meet the company’s standards.
But come on, Google: Spam filters are hugely popular, and for good reason. About half of all email traffic on the Internet is spam. No other email sender (not even Google itself) is exempt from Gmail’s spam filter. That’s because Google’s new policy isn’t rooted in better product design — it’s rooted in politics.
Republican lawmakers have been slamming the tech giant for political bias in its products, using a North Carolina State University study this year that showed Gmail’s spam filter was biased against Republican emails, making it harder for them to To raise funds. Never mind that the study’s authors say their work has been misrepresented.
Google has vehemently denied that its spam filter is politically biased, but is still trying to score points in Washington by touting its new plan to address politicians’ current fundraising woes. “It’s a big gift for politicians,” said Weintraub, who voted against the decision to make Google’s program legal.
“The idea of exceptions [to the spam filter] It seems very unfortunate that it should start to get bogged down — the rather fragile record of evidence that this is indeed a problem,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.
How to Make Democracy Less Annoying and Dangerous Online
At the heart of online political communication is the lack of accountability. The few existing rules for spam, robocalls and personal data explicitly don’t apply to politicians. Even clicking “unsubscribe” usually just results in more unwanted messages.
We should be able to say no. Weintraub said: “We could certainly have better rules where people can opt out — and do so without 47 steps or entering more information about yourself.”
Google could also help by developing product improvements starting with Gmail users rather than politicians. Rather than centralizing these emails into our main inbox, Gmail gives us one-click tools to easily put them into special folders or labels. Even better: give us a one-time unsubscribe setting to cover all future messages.
Google’s new program does have a good idea hidden within its larger scary program. Gmail plans to begin monitoring whether participants in its pilot actually complete unsubscribe requests within 24 hours. Google also said it will penalize senders who are flagged as spam by more than 5 percent of users.
And then there’s the bigger question: how did they get your email or phone number in the first place? Today, campaigns typically buy voter registration lists and then sell or trade the database, allowing your information to be passed on to more people without your consent. Every new election season turns into a game of whack-a-mole.
The core issue is that when helping themselves, politicians have zero qualms about invading our privacy. When I searched for what the campaign knew about me ahead of the 2020 election, I found a treasure trove of data about my income, debt, family, religion, and gun ownership. The RNC boasts that it has more than 3,000 data points per voter.
The campaign says political speech deserves special protections — including the collection and sale of data about us as speech. “It’s a First Amendment minefield,” said Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy — and unfortunately, the current court case is against us.
“I have a lot of sympathy for people saying, ‘I’m overwhelmed and I don’t want it anymore.’ But we want to make sure we reserve a place for candidates to talk to potential voters,” Weintraub said. “When you’re talking about a political message, it’s a more complicated issue than talking about people trying to sell you soap.”
California’s privacy law, one of the toughest in the nation, requires businesses to disclose what they know about you, instructing them to stop selling it and remove it. If we apply basic personal data laws for companies to politicians, what harm will it do to democracy?
“What we want is strong privacy protections across the board, no matter who ends up accessing that information,” said Givens of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “We want the free flow of information around different activities and movements. But violating people’s privacy in order to identify target-rich environments is very problematic and doesn’t match what users want to see.”
Beyond the volume of spam, election experts are more concerned about how political emails and text messages spread misinformation. Using modern microlocation tools and artificial intelligence, politicians can send messages designed to hit every voter’s hotkey. Or worse, they can tailor lies to each voter.
While social networks are increasingly flagging or removing dangerous or misleading posts, it’s hard to put harmful filters on email.
Currently, Google is not obligated by law to monitor for deceptive information. We probably don’t want Google, our email provider, to be in the business of checking emails for authenticity.
But there are other ways to increase accountability or at least transparency. “They could expose highly reported spam material to academics and journalists as a step toward greater accountability for political actors,” said Jennifer Stromer-Ghalley, a professor at Syracuse University who has studied political emails for years. Jennifer Stromer-Galley) said. In theory, Google could also flag emails known to come from the biggest criminals.
But aren’t email communications private? You could argue that politicians should be held to a higher standard when it comes to campaigning. “Going further, yes, I’m also advocating that all political organization emails be made public as well,” Stromer-Galley said.
Ultimately, politicians can make the rules. And, so far, they haven’t seen their credibility tarnished by forming alliances with the most abused people on the web (spammers).
