Google Defeats RNC Lawsuit Claiming Email Spam Filters Harmed Republican Fundraising 84
A U.S. judge has thrown out a Republican National Committee lawsuit accusing Alphabet's Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders. From a report: U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, on Wednesday dismissed the RNC's lawsuit for a second time, and said the organization would not be allowed to refile it. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated California's unfair competition law.
The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.
The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.
Not really a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
On a related note I've gotten actual polling calls lately that my cell phone provider flags as spam. Stuff from polling firms you'd recognize. So the polls are going to be a *mess*. Nobody who isn't answering every call right now is gonna get polled.
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Poland not US thus political phone calls are very rare -- but I do report every single such call as spam -- and almost always it's already tagged as "suspected spam caller".
We have tools to stop phone spam, why not use them?
We don't have tools to stop phone spam. (Score:2)
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What do you mean? The official definition of spam explicitly states that political messages aren't spam. (Well, perhaps not. But that's the way I remember it from a decade or so ago.)
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What do you mean? The official definition of spam explicitly states that political messages aren't spam. (Well, perhaps not. But that's the way I remember it from a decade or so ago.)
It might be the official definition, but there is no way that I want political messages in my email. So they are my definition of spam.
During political silly season, nothing gets through to my phone other than people and businesses in my address book. If it ain't there, it goes to voicemail.
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Why limit yourself to just "silly season"?
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The definition of spam that's in use on my phone is "whatever people report", and that works well. I don't use the spyphone for much -- but you can't be without one these days even if you lug a trustworthy machine beside the android/iphone -- thus I didn't tinker with its setup anywhere near the usual degree. And apparently whatever is used for spam reports was installed by default (I don't see anything I installed myself).
I use the spyphone for voice and SMS to avoid the usual "phone doesn't boot because
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What do you mean? The official definition of spam explicitly states that political messages aren't spam. (Well, perhaps not. But that's the way I remember it from a decade or so ago.)
There's a difference between the legal and the common colloquial definition of spam. No surprise that the politicians carved out an exception for their own spam. However, most people would still consider political spam not only as spam but as annoying spam.
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I found out that a lot of this is opt-in. That is, AT&T did not start marking incoming calls on a landline as potential spam, or as a verified caller, until I requested that feature. That is, they KNOW the calling phone number is bogus, that it is not actually originating in the local area, but let it go through anyway.
Normally I am opposed to opt-out style if forcing people to have a feature; but in this case when it's known a caller providing a bogus recipient number and location it should automatic
Re: Not really a surprise (Score:1)
It's likely not perfect. T-Mobile started doing a similar thing where they offered to drop calls if they didn't appear to come from the same route that their origin information suggested. While it is a red flag, it's not absolutely certain. As soon as I opted into that (no charge for it btw) the spoofed number calls (that appear to be a different number within your same local prefix) basically disappeared overnight. I think there was all of one legitimate caller that couldn't call me but I could call them,
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With AT&T the calls aren't blocked, but they show up on the phone's display as "suspected spam", or "unknown caller", and phone numbers that match the actual caller are marked "[v]" for verified.
What's the point of having all those tubes? (Score:2)
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Depends upon what the email said, but the vast vast majority of RNC related emails have all the hallmarks of spam. Constant, have unrelated information, clickbait style subject lines, invisible keywords to get past filters, from addresses that are strange one-off addresses, ALL CAPS, excessive exclamation points, etc. And a lot of it should be considered spam - it comes in large volumes, or fraudulently claims to be directly from Trump or his campaign. If it's a PAC it should say up front that it's a PAC and not a personal letter from Trump.
FTFY (Score:1)
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey look, a cultist following the cultist playbook.
If you win in court / elections - it's obvious and we shouldn't have even needed to have gone through all that. What a joke and waste of time!
If you lose in court / elections - obviously it's rigged! The communists / marxists / socialists cheat at everything and miraculously nobody can prove anything because they're so good at it and leave absolutely no evidence ever, and nobody ever blows the whistle!
You sound like a fucking moron. You can't only be happy with the system when you win.
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Unfortunately, the Justice system somehow acquired an heir of respectability that it doesn't deserve. Partisan politics play a strong role in rulings. Therefore, people will complain when the system produces what seems to be a biased result. The only way to really judge the judges in these cases is to compare their rulings with the Constitution and applicable laws.
In this case, it is very clear that Google is selectively targeting political emails from Republicans. I interact semi-regularly with politicians
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On a related note I've gotten actual polling calls lately that my cell phone provider flags as spam. Stuff from polling firms you'd recognize. So the polls are going to be a *mess*. Nobody who isn't answering every call right now is gonna get polled.
The polls have been a mess now for years. With the push to online polling you're pretty much eliminated the random element to it, in order to fill out a poll online you need to sign up to be a pollster. So you're only getting responses from people who want to be polled. This is gong to skew it towards the highly opinionated and narcissistic types of personality.
This is why the polls have been so consistently wrong in recent years.
The old joke used to be that polls are filled out by those not smart eno
spam is spam (Score:4, Informative)
sorry, if your a Nigerian prince or Joe 6 pack running for a seat on the city council, and you send me an unsolicited email begging for money ... you are damn right its going into the spam folder if its not already "on the list" to go there automatically
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And as soon as you put a few similar mails into the spam folder, most mail systems will automatically assuming similar messages are also spam.
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I knew a woman whose actual legal name was Princess. She had a lot of trouble with spam filters.
We have always been friends with Eurasia. (Score:4, Insightful)
In another age I would, at this point, archly ask the RNC why its campaign emails were coming from a known Russian bot farm, drop the mic, and walk away. But now this devastating bit of rhetoric would probably just result in an altar to Putin being erected on their front lawn.
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Explains why I haven't seen it. (Score:2)
something seems off (Score:1, Interesting)
They're onto you. (Score:2)
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I get both, and I'm undeclared on the voter registration and have never publicly supported either side. My mother gets exclusively RNC spam, but then she has responded to them and sent money, etc, so she's a clear "mark". But spam is weird, an inexact science, so sometimes you get targetted for some odd reason. For snail mail spam, except when it's close to an election and the candidates send out bulk fliers, the majority of mail spam is Republican ("take our survey!", "support the family!", "please send
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sulfide complained:
I am not a reigstered republican or democrat, yet my inbox is full of biden kamala emails thtat i keep saying spam/unsub yet it keeps coming...haven't got a single republican email.. so WTF is up?
It's very possible your phone number previously belonged to someone who donated to Obama's first campaign for president. I know mine did, because many of the Democrat-for-any-office spam emails I get refer to her by name as "Ruth" - and the SMS texts frequently conclude with a "friendly" reminder that "You agreed to receive these messages," even though I did no such thing. Also, "text stop to opt out" doesn't work, because so many different Democratic fundraising organizations have purcha
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Thank you for the sample size of one.
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FYI - some lists don't ever remove you. best you'll get is a lower spam rate. human volunteers sometimes can't even remove you - except mark you as something else - saying you are now on the other party is your best bet to be left alone.
They also SHARE lists between them so you get of the politician's official list because they don't want to upset you greatly - but you end up shared with somebody they made friends with and so then you get stuff another state and somebody you never heard about. They succeed
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Not joking, check your spam folder.
I'm getting them fairly evenly from both sides, 6 emails and a text in the last 5 hours. The sneaky bit is PACs raising money "for" Candidate that aren't the Candidate PACs. I can't gauge how prevalent this is on the Blue team since everything gets routed through ActBlue, but the Red team doesn't have the same apparat so it's more apparent there.
Who do you mean by "they" (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter temporarily suppressed a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop. But they are technically allowed to do that. We're of course free to call them out on it.
The rest of the media still reported on it. Except they were not able to independently verify much because Rudy Giuliani has control of the data and was not sharing it in its entirety with most major news outlets. So this is more of a story of how the right suppressed their own story through incompetence.
Re:Who do you mean by "they" (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite claiming he's "free speech", that pedo guy Musk has suspended White Dudes for Harris [newsweek.com] because they raised over $4 million in a few hours.
I guess when that weirdo says "free speech" he only means stuff that he agrees with.
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calling Musk a pedo without something to back that up is crossing the line into libel
perhaps the op is a billionaire and can successfully defend himself calling others a pedo guy. that sort of thing has happened before [bbc.com]
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The evidence chain on that laptop is so flimsy that Lionel Hutz could get it dismissed.
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They can appeal if they think the judge erred. I doubt the judge made a mistake here, it's pretty open and shut. RNC's emails were not deliberately filtered and in fact the RNC was basically going out of their way to make their emails spammy and ignoring all the best practices Google and others publish on how to send legitimate mass emails that won't get filtered.
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Oh yes, because LGBTQ+ means Republican hater automatically, and will let their bias screw up all their legal judgements.
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Yup, paybacks are a motherfucker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is damage that will last generations.
It's a private company (Score:2)
Why would Republicans want to interfere with private enterprise? Shouldn't a business have a right to do whatever it wants? I mean if you don't like it, then go some place else. Vote with your dollars people. Etc.
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Freedom for me, not for thee. They only complain when it gets in THEIR way, but they will push for it if it hurts the other side.
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The courts rule in my favor, then they're doing their job properly. If they rule against me, it is clearly because the judicial system is broken!
Doesn't matter which party sends me email (Score:5, Insightful)
I mark them all as spam. Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, doesn't matter. If I didn't sign up for the email, it's spam.
My guess is that a whole lot of other people agree, and actively mark all of these as spam. Google is right to automatically mark them as such. Of course, if you DO want these, they have a "Not Spam" button that lets you mark the sender as "safe." They're pretty good about honoring this.
Phone Spam in Canada (Score:2)
I mark them all as spam. Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, doesn't matter. If I didn't sign up for the email, it's spam.
I would put robocalls in the same category. Here in Canada you can add your phone number to a national Do Not Call registry, and there are penalties for callers that don't comply. Unfortunately, there is a specific exemption for political parties, so during every election I get bombarded with unsolicited partisan phone calls.
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Yeah, we have a DNC registry in the US too, and spammers simply ignore it. Most of them get around the law by locating their call centers outside of the US.
Google argues it acted in good faith (Score:3)
So, they don't deny they marked the emails as spam.
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From what folks have been saying, they were not only marked as spam, they were essentially indistinguishable from spam. The only way to tell would be to understand that they came from a political group rather than someone pretending to be the same.
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RNC had the mails being curated by some rather fishy internet advertisement company or bought the service of consultants who normally help selling penis enlargement pills.
Well why wouldn't they? Those fishy boner pill companies already had the correct mailing lists.
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Anyone who has ever set up a marketing email domain, and knows the reasons why you do that, and how domain email reputation is scored and maintained would have looked at the messages they were sending and said "yeah of course that got marked as spam. It fucking IS spam."
There are clearly established guidelines about how to pre-warm a domain's reputation, as well as how to format marketing emails in order to prevent automatic filtering. There are entire service-based businesses around this. They couldn't
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Google Can Alter Spam Filter for Political Emails, FEC Decides [bgov.com]
In chess, one resigns when they are beaten. (Score:2)
Please do us the same courtesy here, sir.
Not to put too fine a point on it - if you want to play stupid, feel free. Don't act like we are.
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Rep. Greg Steube: July 2020: “My question is, why is this only happening to Republicans? [thewrap.com]”
Look at their messages (Score:4, Insightful)
The Trump Republican campaign is an endless attempt to enrage people and grift them.
Whether it's hate speech or attempting to mislead you so you reach deeper into your pockets, it does not surprise me one bit that more Republican political emails trigger spam filters than Democrat emails. You might as well complain that it gets wet outside when it rains.
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If the current state of the American republic does not enrage you
The collapse of an empire is always an ugly thing
Going back (Score:5, Informative)
If you read stories from the time period, google told the RNC exactly how to stop their messages from being flagged as spam. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/r... [cbsnews.com]
The RNC was either too stupid or pig headed to follow simple instructions.
Since then, the commission has approved a pilot program that creates a way for political committees to get around spam filters so their fundraising emails find their way into recipients' primary inboxes. Gmail is participating in the " Verified Sender Program, " which allows senders to bypasses traditional spam filters, but also gives users the option of unsubscribing from a sender. If the unsubscribe button is hit, a sender is supposed to remove that Gmail address from their distribution lists.
As of Friday evening, the RNC had not signed up to participate in the pilot program.
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Oh boo hoo.
Advertisers spend money to have their ads shown to you. Don't like it? Then pay YouTube for their ad-free subscription. Oh, you're too cheap to do that? Then live with the ads.
Kamala's campaign has mountains of cash being donated - did you think they were going to fill up a Scrooge McDuck money bin with it and go for a swim? They're going to spend it on electioneering, which surprisingly includes advertising to potential voters.
God you trumpists are self-centered fucking morons. The world d
Perspective from long-time abuse researcher (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway: spam is a bipartisan problem. But that said: it's mostly a Republican problem because Democrats seem to have slowly gotten a clue and shifted to confirmed opt-in processes, while Republicans are still running all kinds of web sites that allow anybody to sign up anybody AND don't do verification, rate-limiting, or anything that stops automated subscription attacks. And those, in turn, get their sending systems/networks/domains added to blacklists.
Republicans have also started (in the last 2 years) doing something exceptionally sleazy: they're using evasive tactics to get around blacklists. This doesn't work -- we've known how to detect these and thwart them for about 30 years -- but they're doing it anyway. So not only are they making problems for themselves, they're doing what they can to compound them. This irritates the heck out of some people, and those people happen to be the ones who have their hands on the dials and levers that control email systems, and tapdancing on their last nerve is not a good move.
Republicans could fix this problem in a week if they wanted to, if they were willing to listen, if they were willing to use well-established best practices and behave responsibly/ethically. But they haven't, and they won't, because its existence allows them to play their favorite political card: "We, the white American men who enjoy wealth and privilege and power, are the most persecuted and oppressed people in the history of this planet."
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My old gullible friend now has dementia and can't remember day to day and they were emailing, calling and probably texting him EVERYDAY until his wife cut off his money!
They literally would repeat the same scam over and over and he couldn't remember if he had just given them money! I wonder how many people they shamefully exploit like this! (arguably they are already shameful but picking on dementia is a new low that is surprising even for them.)
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Republicans could fix this problem in a week if they wanted to, if they were willing to listen, if they were willing to use well-established best practices and behave responsibly/ethically.
That would require them to have respect for others; however, others do not deserve respect BECAUSE they are 'others', so yeah, the behavior will continue because that is where their logic leads them to.
Refile ... (Score:2)
It depends (Score:2)
My inbox received a LOT more DNC spam, this is in California. minimum 6 daily. Very spammy. I remember they constantly were asking me to "chip in"
I'd get an RNC one about two-three times a week, moderately spammy.
I'm not sure how much the filter was filtering out emails of this nature, but I was amazed at the quantity of DNC email
Uh, you DO realize what you did, right? (Score:2)
And we all assume that you read the TOS completely and accepted whatever they said (probably by actively ticking a check-box at a DNC site, and possibly a default to untick - if offered - at an RNC site). Just to say, that sort of takes the 'spam' designation right out of the picture. You asked for it, you got it.
Now, go unsubscribe from both. Pay attention to how long each one takes to process your removal - and if you watermarked
Doesn't 50% of everybodies email end up in the spa (Score:1)
Because their emails sound exactly like spam (Score:2)
I signed up for emails from the RNC and Trump campaign. And dude, those guys sound like total scammers. For instance, one has this actual link text in it:
Don’t miss this chance to put YOUR NAME on the Official JD Vance Birthday Card!
I mean, come on. At least it's truth in advertising, sounding like the scammers they are.