Republicans Sue Google to Try to Force Spam into Your Inbox | Hacker News Reader

Republicans Sue Google to Try to Force Spam into Your Inbox

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30 pointspavel_lishin36 comments

> One email sent by the re-election campaign of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) lists its sender as “Reservation Confirmation,” with the subject line “FLIGHT NUMBER: 8341.” The message itself states the former president has “invited you to join him for a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago!”

I get these types of emails all of the time. I had no idea they were even legitimately from Republican fundraisers - I thought these were pure scammers trying to impersonate them! Wow, so bad.

Clearly, this is a dumb lawsuit that has no merit whatsoever. However, the goal is not to get emails delivered, it's so these "expert" staffers can turn around and say "see, we're not bad at our job. We're victims!"

> If the Democrats were doing this, Fox News would be having a field day about this kind of ridiculousness.

Although, I really don't love this rhetoric. No one reading this article watches Fox News. But they almost certainly do cover all sort of "dumb" lawsuits that Democrats file. Why not just stick to the merits of this case and not write about the "meta".

> I had no idea they were even legitimately from Republican fundraisers - I thought these were pure scammers trying to impersonate them!

Huge overlap in that Venn diagram. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/13/1104648634/january-6-panel-tr...

I imagine this will be perceived as an insult to the right wing, but it is something they'll remark on in their media from time to time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-real-pro...

Does this explain why my inbox is currently filled with political spam? Or is it just that we're a couple weeks away from an election?

Sort of. Here’s what I know:

First Republicans complained they were being censored compared to Democrats. Their emails tend to look more like SPAM. But I’m sure that’s not why they were ending up in SPAM folders. It was totally censorship.

Due to threats of regulation/etc. Google made a program were campaigns(?) could register to keep their emails going into inboxes and not hit the filters.

Republicans decided not to sign up? Maybe so they could sue and score more political points with their base based on their supposed ‘censoring’?

Democrats, however, were happy to sign up so now even more of their emails hit the inbox.

Lovely.

So between the flat out increased volume as we approach the election and everything above it’s gotten worse.

> Their emails tend to look more like SPAM. But I’m sure that’s not why they were ending up in SPAM folders. It was totally censorship.

Wait, so things that, by your account look like spam and hence end up in spam folders is censorship? Makes no sense.

As another person identified, that was meant sarcastically.

I think it was sarcasm.

Just the election. Most political "spam" doesn't meet the technical definition that mail systems use, unfortunately.

Is it actual spam? Is there no unsubscribe button? Are you sure you didn't sign up for any mailing lists?

Unsubscribe button doesn't make it not spam. Political campaigns are notorious contact info buyers, because the government wrote itself and its cronies an exemption from spam laws, calling it "free speech".

I didn't say it was. The questions were separate.

I have clicked hundreds of these unsubscribe links and they still keep coming. I don't have the patience anymore. FWIW they are spam for Democratic pols, and all seemed to start in 2020 after the Sanders pivoted to drumming up support for the Biden/Harris ticket (before that I only got email from the Sanders campaign about the Sanders campaign, which I didn't consider spam since I had signed up for it). But the last ~week has been the worst, like 20-30 very obvious spam per day, for races I've never heard of in states I've never lived.

I used to get tons of campaign emails but I just kept clicking unsubscribe and now I get very few.

Same. But the experience has kept me from every donating again.

Dunno, most of the spam on my gmail account takes the form of mailing lists or newsletters, and I go out of my way to never subscribe to mailing lists or newsletters.

Often it's advertising services that aren't even available in my region.

They get your info from voter registration / party registration.

Any chance that the FCC might take action against these groups for violating the CAN-SPAM act? Or maybe even turning this into a class action lawsuit? Some of the examples given in the article are not just spam but downright scams.

Not a great chance. It's really problematic policing political communications, particularly partisan political communications. Think of how much trouble we had when the IRS was investigating various "charities", and there was just the perception that there was a conservative bent to them.

Huh ? I've been getting tons of political spam already. Has google been biased about what types of spam they allow ?

If you read the article, you'd learn that Republicans have been sending very spammy and deceptive e-mails at much higher rates near the end of the month/quarter/reporting period. They get spam filtered.

All Republican political advertising looks more spammy to me than anything produced by or for a Democrat. There's always lots of words in all caps, weirdly initial-capped phrases, short sentences or sentence fragments, large fonts, etc. This includes paper and billboard advertising as well.

Consider your demographics and it might seem more intentional.

Twelve year olds? Because that's how twelve year olds type

This is xXxCongressBlasterOGxXx asking for your support to stop the Evil Liberal Agenda! Follow me on TikTok for deets.

Do the kids still say deets?

> Has google been biased about what types of spam they allow ?

Yes. If political messages from Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to get stopped by spam filters, then this would be a non-issue.

Did I miss the '/s'...or have you never been around needy, high-drama kids?

It does not matter if Chris is receiving more & bigger helpings of chocolate ice cream than Pat is - if Chris is a spoiled brat, or is predisposed to getting all worked up emotionally, or likes the extra attention & ice cream that comes with throwing a screaming fit, then the actual facts of the matter don't count for sh*t.

I wonder how email could be fixed if there was no Spam AI filters.

I guess there would be domain whitelists, or rather an user specific domain whitelist.

Every mail would be spam or grey list by default until the user explicitly decides he wants to allow a domain.

It would be fastidious, but at the same time I would have greater control over my email, because automated email are not spam but I also want to sort them and delete them.

I think that's how the Hey email service does it.

Until we put politicians in the same legal jeopardy that any advertiser would be in for lying about a product, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As long as my actions re spam removal still work they can do what they want globally. Take them away and I will learn how google forwards email.

I followed The Walking Dead before I read about Trump asking a US general : 'What's the point of having nuke if we don't use them ?'... That was for its campain in 2015...

It got me hooked forever... Let me get this strait : the least moronic, mean, corrupt republicain is 10 times more dangerous then a whole army of zombies.

A guy in a wheelchair could survive an apocalipse zombiy because they're so slow that even him could 'ride away' from them. But if republicans win a majority in congress by 1 single vote from a republican voter, they will gut his wheelchair benefit because, you know, 'socialism'.

A kid can survive a zombie apocalypse... There is a video game which proves it (by the now defunct Telltale Studio). But if he steals a can of beans, a republican judge paid by the owner of a prison for kids will send him there for 2 years and he will hang himself 2 months after he gets out.

Not a single republican voted for the 'inflation act' which enacted the first legal framework to fight the climate change. And a republican majority led SCOTUS declared unconstitutional obligations for energy producers to reduce their carbon footprint. But the whole population of zombies in the world are carbon neutral.

If Alex Jones had to fight an army of zombies, he would call them 'crisis actors' and send his followers to hunt them from east coast to west coast.

Republican knows no bottom, and when they reach it, they dig.

Silly. Any SPAM filter should be user driven. If you mark Democrat or Republican emails as SPAM then the system, Gmail or others, should put those in your SPAM folder.

The worst are political bulk emails that do not have an unsubscribe link. I kept getting stuff from Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party that I was not interested in and they did not offer an unsubscribe option - but marking them as SPAM fixed the problem.

I am a Libertarian mostly because they are the only viable party against forever wars, but also because I don’t have to talk politics since Democratic and Republican friends and family tend to not want to talk politics with me, a big win!

> I am a Libertarian mostly because they are the only viable party against forever wars

I mean this gently and not as snark: In the U.S.'s first-past-the-post electoral system, at the national level no third party is "viable" in any meaningful sense.

History: On the national stage, no third party has been successful to any degree since the Republican Party emerged from the ashes of the Whig Party in 1856. The most that any third-party presidential candidate has been able to do is play the spoiler: see 1912 (T. Roosevelt -> Wilson), possibly 1992 (Ross Perot -> Clinton), 2000 (Ralph Nader -> Bush II), 2016 (Jill Stein -> Trump).

What this means: In the U.S. — with its mostly-rigid control of Congress and state legislatures by party caucuses — the rational choice for voters is to pick the party (not the individual candidate) that's least objectionable in your eyes. Voting for a third party just makes it that much more likely that your more-objectionable party will win.

Thanks, I don’t mind your comment at all, it is true that between the military industrial complex, Wall Street, etc. it is a lock for the two parties.

Read the comments here and on other posts, I've noticed a jolt to the center from HN. Interesting - I think a lot of people assumed things would go back to normal with Biden, and are becoming disillusioned. Maybe Trump more or less going away has evened the playing field a bit.

I also see "Latinx" a lot less lately, a term which my LatAm friends despise. Maybe the hysteria is fading after the national psychosis of 2020.

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