Federal election regulators voted Thursday to allow Google to proceed with a plan to make it easier for campaign emails to bypass spam filters.
Google’s proposal to run a pilot project changing the filters for political emails came after intense Republican criticism that spam filters were biased against conservatives, a charge the tech giant denies. In a sign of public disgust with spam, the Federal Election Commission received thousands of public comments urging it to deny the request.
But a majority of the six-member commission decided that Google’s project did not constitute an improper in-kind political contribution that would violate federal campaign finance laws.
This reminds me of Twitter admitting it won’t ban nazis because that would mean banning accounts of Republican politicians. I remember the days being biased against nazis was a good thing. Times sure do change.
I am old enough to remember the letter to The Guardian denouncing Kruschev as a Nazi sympathizer. Sometimes, the term was just a magic way to pretend Stalin’s purges and gulags never existed.
The FEC has no authority to block spam. If everyone can get the same benefit, the FEC has to allow it. The FCC might be able to block this since spam is one of their issues.
This will likely backfire for any candidate that tries to utilize it. Spam that can’t be blocked will probably join late night phone calls in causing voters to eschew a candidate.
@Thom, I would respectfully disagree on banning Nazis. Not that I have the zero approval for them, but in general free speech is a good thing.
The quote above is from https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie. Not to mention the lawyer they sent was Jewish. They would know first hand the results of lack of freedom of speech.
That being said, I would mark all unsolicited political mail spam by default. I am not against them sending those emails, but I personally have the right not to read them.
The fact is that this is not a free speech issue. The government has never said these people can’t send the emails. Instead, through heuristic, Gmail has identified the message as spam and directs it to the Spam Folder. Note the messages are not deleted. Anyone looking to receive these messages can go to their Spam Folder and click “Not Spam”.
Additionally, free speech does not guarantee that others should be subjected to your drivel. It is well within the rights of others to mark anyone as a nuisance and choose to not be around them. That is also part of the 1st amendment: freedom of assembly.
Instead of free speech, what we have is a political minority choosing to force their views onto everybody else. By doing so, they knowingly infringing on someone else’s freedom of assembly. This minority also wants to make their speech free of consequences. They want to be able to insult everyone around and have the government force others to remain chained to their soap box. Because, you know, their right to free of speech is more important than mine.
teco.sb,
I think I agreed with what you said in my response above.
Yes, spam is not a free speech issue.
But banning is.
But we aren’t talking about banning anything here. And most importantly, the government isn’t banning spam. What’s happening is that Gmail is automatically sorting certain emails into a folder that isn’t your Inbox. The sorting criteria is provided by heuristics and user input. None of this is mandated or otherwise sanctioned by the government. The spam filter is provided as a convenience to Gmail users. Again, the emails are still being delivered. Some folks just want to force their speech down our throat instead of accepting that most people want to use technology to avoid manually sorting them into the “unwanted” pile”.
teco.sb,
We seem to be talking past each other.
Anyway, I am not disagreeing with your main point.
sukru,
Did you ever see “See no evil hear no evil”? Funny movie with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGo4mPa_bWc
I agree with the idea that various groups should have the right of free speech. I also agree that we are free to ignore their speech. On those points, I think we agree.
But, the question comes in of whether Gmail truly sorts things into the spam folder by simple neutral heuristics, free of bias. Or do they, under the hood, sort out certain speech as “spam,” which is speech various persons/groups at Google doesn’t like? Consider the case with James Damore. Whether or not you agree with him, Google’s response seemed overly eager to silence it and silence any dissent to their response. I think that’s far more concerning.
In my case, I don’t trust Google to be neutral, so I’ve chosen another provider for much of my email. And that solution works for me. But, I can also understand this group’s feelings on the matter. They seem to feel an intermediary, between two persons/groups’ free speech, has unilaterally decided to hamper such speech without consent of either person/group.
What if the USPS did similar by delivering certain parcels to a spam container on your property? And let’s say after a certain number of days, the trash company would empty said container of anything you didn’t pull out. I certainly get plenty of mail where that feature would be handy. Now, what if people started talking & noticing collectively that certain parcels were delivered there, not because they wanted the parcels there. Would they not rightfully have questions and concerns about the USPS’s criterion for putting the parcels in such a container?
Now, is the solution, mentioned in the article, appropriate? That’s certainly debatable. But, if the intermediary is hampering free speech via the spam filters, then one can understand why the person/group sending the email would want to bypass said filters.
Alfman,
That was a good movie. I should watch it again sometime.
If it should be legal to spam people with political garbage, it should also be legal to punch them in the face when they do considering that’s far less harmful than the partisan idiocy going on day in day out. I hardly hear anyone talking about what they’re willing to do to work with `the other side`. Instead, politicians would rather pour gasoline on the country and light matches so they can watch it burn and pretend somebody else did it.
The problem with banning free speech is that it’s a slippery slope.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Nazi.
Then they came for the Christians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Christian.
Then they came for the Moderates, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Moderate.
Then they came for the Liberals, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Liberal.
…
Your Freedom of Speech stops at my property line, be it physical or digital. The `slippery slope` argument isn’t really valid either. We have had no problem drawing lines in the sand for other things. It’s just that when it would affect corrupt politicians or the wealthy, then it’s a problem.
Let’s just be happy our grandparents did not have your mentality when they stormed the beaches of Normandy. Dear lord.
What is it you disagree with? That your rights don’t extend into my private property & space, or that you think corrupt politicians and the wealthy don’t get special treatment?
friedchicken,
The wordpress theme makes it look like he was responding to you, but when you turn off the “.bypostauthor” CSS rule you can see it was a response to j0scher.
IMHO it’s a bad design for wordpress to change a post’s horizontal placement.
@Alfman
Thanks for mentioning that and I certainly agree about the bad design.
Christ. It takes a special kind of crass to post a knockoff of Martin Niemöller’s poem as an apology for actual neo-Nazi rhetoric in the public space, let alone to put Christians second on the list.
Go home, goy boy, you’re drunk.
But those emails are spam. I always get weird political spam on my gmail account. All other email providers seem capable of blocking it, but no matter how much I mark this shit as spam, google just doesn’t filter spam from conservative sources. If they are spam they need to be treated as spam.
If I remember correct, Thom makes a living by working as a translator or something, so it surprises me that he seems completely illiterate.
Twitter won’t ban “nazis” because the unsophisticated filters would also catch a lot of innocent people, which they believe would include high-profile politicians, which again would make them retaliate against Twitter in many ways. That’s bad for business.
Of course you blindly hate Republicans and therefore mentioning them in any way in the same sentence with nazis makes you equate the two. That’s sad, so sad.
Pretty much this exactly.
If they had stuck with being just a media distribution platform instead of turning into an editorializing media outlet… they never would have had such problems.
Specifically if someone posted objectionable or illegal content it should be ON THEM… to remove it and suffer any damages… but this gets back around to ensuring that your site is populated with real people and not bots or fake accounts.
In order to achieve that, they’d have to provide no privacy protection to their users. You can’t this both ways.
Also, many of those Republicans who would have gotten caught by those anti-nazi filters, are actual Nazis. Let’s not bury the lede.
Well that’s not ideal. No one needs more spam, most especially vacuous politician campaign spam email.
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