William Gallagher
Google is launching a trial that will see Gmail users getting more emails from election candidates whether they are wanted or not.
Big Tech companies have previously been criticized for allegedly limiting conservative viewpoints. Now Google is attempting to redress that by removing limitations on any political campaign emails.
According to Axios, the pilot program will go ahead in time for the midterms, after the Federal Election Commission gave permission.
"We expect to begin the pilot with a small number of campaigns from both parties," said Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda, "and will test whether these changes improve the user experience, and provide more certainty for senders during this election period."
"We will continue to listen and respond to feedback as the pilot progresses," continued Castaneda. "During the pilot, users will be in control through a more prominent unsubscribe button."
Google did already receive feedback during its submission to the FEC. Reportedly, hundreds of negative comments were received, leading the FEC to have extended the deadline because of high interest.
Under the pilot program, Gmail will put the burden on the user to mark political messages as spam. Political campaigners have to enroll in Google's pilot, and then the first mail they send will automatically include a banner.
That banner will ask if users want to keep getting such emails, unsubscribe from political group's list, or report the message as spam. Gmail will continue to scan for malware, however.
Google does say that this is a small pilot program, but given the volume of political mails sent daily, it's not clear how the term "small" applies yet.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
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13 Comments
Really Google? Now who in Hades decided that we wanted to receive ANY, let alone more crap from these scamming con artists?
Yet another reason not to use Google products.
What I find most annoying is that these types of spam email messages are like Legionnaires’ disease. Legionnaires’ disease is a bacterial disease, which has not been eradicated, because there is a reservoir of the bacteria in soil and water. Even, if we achieved herd immunity at any point, newborns from then on would be able to catch the disease.
The political spam I receive contains Unsubscribe links, which, I believe are legit. But, because of the external reservoir of email addresses, which is held in my case by the RNC, I am put on new subscriptions all the time. That’s what you get for registering to vote under a specific party or making a donation to a political candidate. Of course, the law will never change, because a majority of politicians would have to vote to deprive themselves of a source of funding for their next reelection campaign.
As for Google, in principle, it’s a matter of not getting in the way of political free speech protected by the 1st Amendment. Whether there is some other calculation behind it, like that they did the statistical analysis of which party this would benefit more, I don’t know but would suspect there is.
Shouldn't such a bypass feature be opt-in, rather than opt-out (esp. as history has shown us how effective opt-outs are.)
After all the reason why certain right-wing political messages were getting filtered to spam is because they were imperceivable from actual spam messages. That seems like something the user should have a stronger say in.
I mean it's a wild idea: but if one's political messages look like spam.. maybe make them look not so spammy, it's really not hard. However we've clearly entered a new era where governments are interested in using IT companies as a tool for satisfying political and lobbying-derived agendas.
I don't really care since my Gmail addy is for spam only.