The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds.

First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better controversy. We wrote about this a couple months ago. Researchers at North Carolina State University released a preprint of a study about email spam filtering during the 2020 election. They set up a variety of email accounts, and signed up for political mailings. The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam, but found the opposite was true of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which flagged more Democratic politicians’ emails as spam than Republicans.

Of course, Democrats didn’t freak out about this. Only Republicans did, egged on by a disingenuous political trickster, who tried to make this into a big deal, and was aided by Fox News and other disingenuous entities, who turned it into a thing — even to the point of some Republicans filing a laughable complaint with the Federal Election Committee trying to argue that Google was giving an unfair advantage to Democrats.

The authors of the original study, for what it’s worth, appear to be horrified about how their study is being abused by political hacks.

“Gmail isn’t biased like the way it’s being portrayed,” [study author Muhammad Shahzad] said. “I’m not advocating for Gmail or anything. I’m just stating that when we take the observation out of a study, you should take all of the observations, not just cherry-pick a few and then try to use them.”

Furthermore, Shahzad noted that the part of the study being pointed out only applied to Gmail accounts where users did not express their own preferences. Once users added in their own preferences, the impact for Gmail effectively disappeared:

Shahzad said while the spam filters demonstrated political biases in their “default behavior” with newly created accounts, the trend shifted dramatically once they simulated having users put in their preferences by marking some messages as spam and others as not.

“What we saw was after they were being used, the biases in Gmail almost disappeared, but in Outlook and Yahoo they did not,” he said.

In other words, there’s pretty strong evidence here that there’s nothing nefarious going on. Because, seriously, who would actually program a spam filter to try to hide one party’s political spam? The reason so much goes to spam is because many users treat the non-stop bombardment by political campaigns as spam. Because it’s often hellishly spammy.

Anyway, this bill would now effectively require email providers to whitelist all political campaigns from spam filters, unless each user directly calls the emails spam:

In General–It shall be unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label.

The bill would also create a privacy nightmare, in that it requires email providers to release transparency reports detailing how many political campaign emails were flagged as spam. But that would require the email services snoop on your emails. The transparency report would also require the email providers to designate how many Democratic campaign emails were filtered as spam, and how many Republican campaign emails were filtered as spam. So, apparently third parties are shit out of luck.

Even worse, the bill would require any email provider to respond to frequent demands from political campaigns about how often their emails were flagged as spam.

This is performative, unconstitutional nonsense on multiple levels. Even more hilarious, in announcing the bill, Senator John Thune, gave a talk about how the Republican’s “vision” for governing was contrasted with the Democrats, because the GOP doesn’t want “more big government” but rather “allowing free markets to work” and having “a light regulatory touch”… and then uses that as the backdrop to introducing this intrusive, big government bill that would allow the government to block the free market of spam filters, in order to give politicians special rights to avoid your spam filter, and to force businesses to have to file tons of busywork reports documenting their spam filters.

In short, what the Republicans are actually standing for here is “more spam for everyone” and not allowing spam filters to work properly.

Senator, get your dirty corrupt hands off my spam filter.

Filed Under: algorithms, email, john thune, performative nonsense, spam, spam filtering Companies: google, microsoft, yahoo

In short, what the Republicans are actually standing for here

Is the same as their attacks on moderation, and that is ‘people must listen to us, and vote for us”.

See: The exemption that gave themselves around Texting unsolicited political spam.

And their push, at spammer’s behest, to fill peoples’ voicemail boxes with “ringless” spam.

What’s John Thune’s email address? The Official Monster Raving Loony Party would like to know.

If you mean the senator for South Dakota, you could always send an FOIA request via MuckRock to get that information. 😉

Congress is exempt from FOIA…

Face it — free electronic communications are a failure. The government is going to force spam emails, robocalls and texts onto you — or at least do nothing to stop them as there is too much money to be made. It’s nearing the time to go back to dead trees.

Wut? One of the big ‘justifications’ for closing down the USPS is how spam is endemic in snail mail. Switching to dead trees doesn’t solve the issue, and it would likely increase it if somehow electronic communications were deprecated and people starting paying attention to letters again.

You mean, quit voting Republican.

… when’s the last time you went out to your mailbox to check it’s contents, because I don’t know about you but ‘spam’ in the form of junk advertisements are almost always the majority of what gets delivered.

The thing with physical mail is that the sender has to pay for it. Sure, it might pop BLT be 10 or 25 cents per mailing, but those costs start to add up. Spam email and robo calls effectively cost nothing, so there’s no reason not to use those methods. Plus, I’m sure there are plenty of marketing people who think the best way to get their message across is by annoying people, either with flashing banner ads, multiple spam emails or multiple robo calls.

Not in the UK. Over here, what gets caught in spam filters is scam attempts and a very few genuine communications. You guys need anti-spam laws like ours because when sending spam is made illegal, only criminals send spam. 😊

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Because, seriously, who would actually program a spam filter to try to hide one party’s political spam?

That would be the same SJWs who work to censor one political party’s messaging on social media platforms.

Funny, I could have sworn that Republicans are against social justice of any kind. 😮

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-admits-bias-in-algorithm-for-rightwing-politicians-and-news-outlets

Which political party and what specific messaging are you talking about, Koby?

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This week’s censorship hotspot involves Allie Beth Stuckey of Blaze media and LibaOfTiktok. Very clear anti-conservative bias from twitter.

And why don’t you give any real details?

What exactly are the anti-conservative opinions that are being moderated?

With that in mind, I have three questions for you:

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I reject your definition of the term. That the censoring entity is not directly government controlled does not mean that it can’t be censorship.

That the censoring entity is not directly government controlled does not mean that it can’t be censorship.

I agree. Now tell me how Twitter suspending or banning someone from using Twitter is the exact same thing as being denied the absolute right to speak one’s mind.

Twitter exists on the Internet, which is owned by the US Government, obviously. /s To ignoramuses, ‘created by Department of Defense’ is exactly the same thing as ‘owned by US Government’. The facts they’re too obtuse to realise is that ‘based on ARPANet’ isn’t the same as actually being ARPANet, and that the Department of Defense released the Internet to the public that had funded its development long before shutting off ARPANet in 1989.

Koby, this is bad faith nonsense. Stuckey was temporarily blocked and then unblocked, because mistakes happen.

I note you don’t mention that Twitter also suspended the account of Chris Evans for engaging in a debate where he called out racism. Because you’re a disingenuous, ignorant person, who only points out moderation on one side of the political aisle while pretending it doesn’t happen on the other (even as it does, all the time).

LoTT wasn’t suspended. She posted some non-trust and safety Twitter employees venting in a “watercooler” channel on Slack about how her tweets were leading to real world violence, such as the Proud Boys showing up at a library event.

So, seriously: you’re spewing one sided ignorance and bullshit and you should stop.

Though I know you won’t.

I note you don’t mention that Twitter also suspended the account of Chris Evans for engaging in a debate where he called out racism.

Of course Koby didn’t do that. To him, “censorship” on social media only happens to conservatives. When a liberal/progressive gets dinged by Twitter, it’s “consequences”.

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Koby, this is bad faith nonsense. Stuckey was temporarily blocked and then unblocked, because mistakes happen.

Itza miracle! Just for criticizing Fox News, she was magically taken down. We’ve been down this road before. When twitter can explain how the mistake happened, then we can reevaluate it. Until then, we can see the bias.

Regarding this Chris Evans fellow, who apparently isn’t Captain America and noone has ever heard of him before, with 1500 instagram followers and a locked down IG account — the reason for his suspension isn’t listed in the reporting, and so isn’t very clear. But as best I can figure, he used racial slurs, and so he’s still suspended as of right now. If conservatives even allude to anything that can be construed as racist, they get suspended. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. He was suspended for an objective rules violation, not a political position. But nice try tho.

Ah, I see. Bans on liberals are obviously fair and correct. And bans on conservatives are proof of bias.

Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?

I believe ‘hypocritical’ would be a better match than ‘ridiculous’ even as both are accurate.

Not like Koby cares, he’s hellbent on wanting us gone.

“Us” being trans people or just anyone who disagrees with his neoNazi viewpoints? 😉

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Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?

The distinction is perfectly logical. You can get banned for objective rules violations, and not subjective political bias on a platform that promotes itself as an open forum. It’s very simple.

You can get banned for objective rules violations, and not subjective political bias on a platform that promotes itself as an open forum.

Parler, Gab, and Truth Social all hailed themselves as open forums for all free speech. All three platforms have banned people for speech that went against conservative orthodoxy. But you don’t care about that because you’re fine with “own the libs” bans.

What’s sad is that pointing out your hypocrisy won’t even shame you into rethinking your shit. After all, hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists.

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But you don’t care about that because you’re fine with “own the libs” bans.

Primarily I don’t care about the other platforms because they’re a such a small percentage of the market that Twitter is effectively a monopoly. At this point, it’s a public forum subject to common carrier rules.

I don’t care about the other platforms because they’re a such a small percentage of the market that Twitter is effectively a monopoly

Popularity alone does not a monopoly make. Even if Twitter were a monopoly, that would still not entitle anyone to a spot on that service…

At this point, it’s a public forum subject to common carrier rules.

…because Twitter is still a privately owned interactive web service.

I don’t want to break out the “public fora” copypasta for you again, Koby. You know what it says because I’ve slapped it in your face before. You know the law says Twitter isn’t a public forum and you know I have the citations to back up that assertion. Go lie about this somewhere else, you stupid bastard.

You know the law says Twitter isn’t a public forum…

Actually, it is, but only in the sense that it’s pubicly accessible rather than publicly owned.

… said nobody with any understanding of monopolies or common carriers, ever.

At this point, it’s a public forum subject to common carrier rules.

At this point, it’s a public forum subject to common carrier rules.

I want you to think hard about this: what does Twitter carry that would make it subject to common carrier rules?

The distinction is perfectly logical.

No, Koby. You are making arbitrary distinctions. You are insisting that every conservative who is found to violate rules is only because of bias. While when we point to liberals who face enforcement, you insist that’s reasonable.

You are pure, unadulterated motivated reasoning. You’re as dishonest as you are ignorant.

Koby’s saying liberal opinions are the strongest.

Regarding this Chris Evans fellow, who apparently isn’t Captain America and no one has ever heard of him before…

<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Evans_(actor)”>Chris Evans. Now fuck off, troll.

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I’m not sure this person realizes it, but it seriously ISN’T the Chris Evans that is the actor for Captain America. The guy went by the handle @notcapnamerica to make the distinction. Perhaps Mike is hoping that there’s confusion regarding someone as prominent as the celebrity getting censored.

You have to add in “woke” and “libt*rd” if you really want to be taken seriously as a RWNJ.

[Hallucinates facts not in evidence]

Hell, Toom, he’s not just hallucinating facts, he’s hallucinating his entire reality sphere! I’d lay money that his hero is Steve Jobs.

I’d lay money that his hero is Steve Jobs.

Isn’t that the whackjob who committed medical suicide at just 56 years old?

He’s the whack job for whom the term “Reality Distortion Field” was coined. In his case, he refined it to very high degree by the time of his self-determined demise.

Even though he was part of the “founding fathers” of personal computerdom, I don’t miss his passing. I have this thing about people who walk around pretending that their balls are bigger than Texas, but are wearing blinders the size of Alaska. Really gives me a case of the jaws.

Some “enlightened” white people would write their own blocking software,etc.

Yes, it’s happened before, and they were ridiculed enough they stopped promoting it. Or had enough backlash that they would eventually stop doing it.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be going ham with the legislation and other bullshit, DESPITE tge ridicule and clearly UnConstitutional stuff they’ve done.

What does that say, Koby?

“I reject your definition of the term.”

Son you’re free to be wrong. God knows we’ve seen you do that enough. That’s not the issue so much. It’s that you are a rank coward which is tiresome.

There was a time when blatantly unconstitutional was a bad thing & there was ridicule & repercussions…

I so fucking miss civics

There was a time when blatantly unconstitutional was a bad thing & there was ridicule & repercussions…

It happened and it was glorious… I’d give more details but there were these brownies I had from this awesome guy who lived around Haight Ashbury in the 60’s and I think I might have lost some memories…

Ridiculous Republican Senators Don’t Respect First Amendment, Introduce Law To Force You To Listen To Them

the GOP doesn’t want “more big government” but rather “allowing free markets to work” and having “a light regulatory touch”… and then uses that as the backdrop to introducing this intrusive, big government bill that would allow the government to block the free market of spam filters, in order to give politicians special rights to avoid your spam filter, and to force businesses to have to file tons of busywork reports documenting their spam filters

Republican messaging has always centered on one idea: a government big enough to tell everyone else what to do but small enough to never tell Republicans what to do.

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“Twitter said it wasn’t clear why its Home timeline produced these results and indicated that it may now need to change its algorithm.”

Translation: right wingers wrote more meaningful stuff that people organically care about, such that the twitter overlords feel the need to manually bias the algorithm to produce artificial results.

Calling bullshit. Where’s your proof?

Yes or no, Koby: If the algorithm favored liberal/progressive users instead of conservative users, would you have offered up the same “translation”?

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Yes or no, Koby: If the algorithm favored liberal/progressive users instead of conservative users, would you have offered up the same “translation”?

It depends. I’d like to see the algorithm. That’s often what folks have been asking for. Since the overlords consistently freak out whenever we ask to take a peek, it’s similar to when police cover up their body cam footage — there’s probably some corruption involved.

A lot of the comments you’ve made in your time here have been about trashing liberals/progressives and their causes, opinions, and political stances. You’ve routinely come off as someone who uses Fox News and Breitbart as your only source of news. If Gmail artificially biased its spam algorithm in favor of liberals/progressives, you would never say “left-wingers wrote more meaningful stuff that people organically care about, such that the twitter overlords feel the need to manually bias the algorithm to produce artificial results”⁠—that, I can all but guarantee.

So no, “it” doesn’t “depend” on shit. You’d never say anything even remotely flattering to liberals. Context is irrelevant when you’ve made your feelings clear enough in the past.

*You’ve routinely come off as someone who uses Fox News and Breitbart as your only source of news, and therefore massively hypocritical in your descriptions of others as ‘idealogues’.

I said what I said, not what you wanted me to say. Please stop “correcting” or “fixing” my posts.

The ‘C’ was for ‘completed’, actually. ‘F’ is for ‘fixed’ or ‘corrected’. Also, it would have scanned a lot better if the comment form hadn’t removed the second asterisk. I’m tired of this markdown experiment disguising my intent and npw making me look malicious. I’m going back to ‘plain text’.

The ‘C’ was for ‘completed’, actually. ‘F’ is for ‘fixed’ or ‘corrected’.

Either way: I said what I said, and I don’t need someone coming in behind me to imply that my thoughts were incomplete or wrong⁠—regardless of their intent. Please stop “correcting”, “fixing”, or “completing” my posts; you’re free to do it to others, but I’m asking you to leave my comments alone.

Damn! Autie’s on the spectrum and you’re the one misunnderstanding what others say?

AC, Stephen might also be on the autistic spectrum, but even if he isn’t, it’s unfair to compare us like that. Quit it, will you?

Corruption; you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

I’d like to see the algorithm.

And what, pray tell are you going to fucking do with it? Just stare at it cluelessly and say ‘yup, there’s the bias, see?’

Fact of the matter is none of you idiots are likely qualified to make any interpretation of it one way or another. Just like Mikey Lindell’s ‘cyber symposium’ that illustrated exactly how ‘technical’ you morons really are.

Yes, but with a hefty dose of role reversal. 😉

Aren’t they all living in the freeze peach paradise that is Truth Social?

You want some cheese with your whine?

I can’t wait to see Democrats flood everyone’s inbox multiple times a day and see how long Republican support for this lasts…

I can’t wait to see Democrats flood everyone’s inbox multiple times a day and see how long Republican support for this lasts…

You kidding me? It won’t even be a speed bump; they’ll have an excuse all ready for why Democratic e-mails are completely different and it’s okay to mark them as spam.

Even worse, the bill would require any email provider to respond to frequent demands from political campaigns about how often their emails were flagged as spam.

Not only is this an onerous waste of time and resources, it’s another domain for the consulting industry to exploit for profit and getting around filters by complaining or gaming.

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The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam, but found the opposite was true of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which flagged more Democratic politicians’ emails as spam than Republicans.

And when you consider that Gmail has close to twice as many email users as Yahoo and Microsoft put together, that bit of whataboutism starts to look a little less serious.

The authors of the original study, for what it’s worth, appear to be horrified about how their study is being abused by political hacks.

Typical. Researchers discover a thing, publish information on it, then get all horrified when people notice it has implications they don’t personally approve of.

Yes or no: Can you prove Gmail employees intentionally biased Gmail’s spamfilter algorithms against conservative politicians/political campaigns?

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Yes, I just need to… Just one more minute… *five hours later* No.

You left out the bit about how the study found that for any users of Gmail who expressed their preferences to the spam filter, the differences disappeared.

Just like the disingenuous politicians pushing this.

In other words… you’re a hack.

Reminder: none of the science James Damore cited actually supported his deranged sexist rants, either.

Since when does a single memo consisting of a reasoned, cogent debate constitute “deranged sexist rants”?

Nobody ever said it does.

And when you consider that Gmail has close to twice as many email users as Yahoo and Microsoft put together, that bit of whataboutism starts to look a little less serious.

Sounds like Yahoo and Outlook would be better email choices for idiots who love their conservative spam, no?

Why don’t you people vote with your data? Seems kinda fucking stupid to use a service from a company you hate.

Why don’t you people vote with your data?

That would require conservatives to do the work of changing over their service provider and updating contacts with the new email and setting up everything on their new service. Making other people do the work of changing a service for the sake of kowtowing to conservative tastes is far easier for conservatives.

It would take work to be sure but I imagine a bigger factor is the enormous sense of self-entitlement that this article describes, where they think they have a right to be heard by an audience of their choosing and they know that if they move to their own platforms the only people around will be a much smaller group compose almost entirely of others like them.

Making other people do the work of changing a service for the sake of kowtowing to conservative tastes is far easier for conservatives.

Yep. Frankly I don’t understand why the companies that they don’t like just simply say ‘fuck off.’

What are they gonna do, leave?

Frankly, I don’t understand why the companies that they don’t like just simply say ‘fuck off.’

They do, hence Twitter bans. 😜

I wish they’d go further and stop trying to pretend they do anything beyond that. They’ve got zero obligation.

Considering the First Amendment was enacted specifically for political speech, making sure that same political speech is protected from censorship, no matter how small, is a good thing.

If I want to dump political emails into my spam filter but the law says my email service can’t legally let me, how would that protect my First Amendment right to say “no, I don’t want to see these emails in my inbox”?

how would that protect my First Amendment right to say “no, I don’t want to see these emails in my inbox”?

It’s a bad law (proposal), but has nothing to do with that right. You could still say it. Your email provider may or may not be able to do anything based on you having said that, which is one thing that makes it a bad law (it depends on the meaning of “unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label”; e.g., would a “filter political spam” checkbox count?).

It’s a bad law (proposal), but has nothing to do with that right.

Except it does. The right to free speech gives me the right to choose what speech I will ignore. A law that would force upon me the speech I want to ignore is a law that would violate my right.

The right to free speech gives me the right to choose what speech I will ignore. A law that would force upon me the speech I want to ignore is a law that would violate my right.

How would it force you to read it?

If you see a subject line in your email you don’t want to read, you’re somehow prohibited from deleting it yourself?

Why should anyone have to delete emails one at a time when they can automate the process with a well-trained spam filter that they can just empty after checking it for genuine communications, Republican shill?

Actually, if an American blocks your emails, that’s them exercising their First Amendment right to not be forced to listen to you, not censorship. Censorship is when government forces people to accept political spam so that their inboxes become so full it blocks useful communication from others.

Considering the First Amendment was enacted specifically for political speech, making sure that same political speech is protected from censorship, no matter how small, is a good thing.

The 1st Amendment was enacted to prevent Congress from interfering with political speech, and this bill does the opposite of that, FORCING private companies to carry political speech.

But you knew that already.

FORCING private companies to carry political speech.

If they decide to just silently delete your important emails, so you never even see them, you’d be fine with that?

In Gmail, any email slotted into the spam folder will stay there for 30 days. If you were expecting an important email that someone told you they sent you but you don’t check your spam folder for a month or refuse to set up a filter that will slide that email into your inbox, that failure is on you.

If they decide to just silently delete your important emails, so you never even see them, you’d be fine with that?

Nope. I’d go somewhere else.

Fixes the problem with the least amount of effort.

If the garage you took your car to started doing things you didn’t like, would you still go there?

I don’t understand you people. You seem to think it’s easier to just perpetually complain about something, rather than just use an alternative and go on with your day.

You feed the same beast you complain about.

How exactly does that sound like a solution that solves the actual problem?

If shit’s better somewhere else, why not fuck off and go somewhere else?

If shit’s better somewhere else, why not fuck off and go somewhere else?

If the proposed legislation passes, shit will be the same everywhere. Where will you fuck off and go then?

If the proposed legislation passes, shit will be the same everywhere.

Initially there will be a boon for 3rd party antispam filters.

Then they’ll complain about them.

They really don’t want what they’re asking for. That’s plainly evident, since no one complaining is talking about using a gmail filter to allow all the spam these tards want.

Since these people are not likely to accept anything as acceptable, it seems reasonable to me for Google to cut bait, and tell these free-market capitalists about all of the other services they can choose from.

It gets rid of the complainers who do nothing but complain. Frankly, nothing of value will be lost.

You really don’t get it, do you? Whilst this bill was written in response to Gmail users blocking Republican spam, it targets all email providers equally. Not only that, but there won’t be any “boon for 3rd party antispam filters” because the proposed legislation targets any and all blocking of political spam, no matter who it is doing the blocking. Free advice: read the article more carefully next time.

If you think that any organization that uses email is just going to tolerate that, I have a bridge to sell you.

That’s counter-intuitive to ANY security policy, regardless of the organization, the regulations they need to comply with, and the data they need to protect.

Do you think that a hospital will respect a ‘right’ for employees to get bombarded with political spam, thus increasing the likelihood of a breach?

What about a credit-rating agency?

How does that added liability affect their cyber insurance?

I appreciate your free advice and would like to reciprocate with my own: the fact that something is possible doesn’t make it in any way probable. This is performative bullshit that does nothing other than feed the mouth-breathers stupid enough to believe it.

And none of your non-points actually matter in a world of legislatively mandated political spam. For example, I’m sure your ISP would like to take your money and provide you with fuck all rather than a minimal service, but the law prevents them doing so.

And none of your non-points actually matter in a world of legislatively mandated political spam.

You think so? Folks who are responsible for infosec are going to lower their defenses because Jethro can’t see Goober’s political ad?

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. It has nothing to do with whether legislation is in place or not. It’s stupid, technologically unrealistic, and will be dropped and forgotten in less than a Scaramucci.

And none of your non-points actually matter in a world of legislatively mandated political spam.

You’re underestimating the security risk that this creates. When everyone decides not to comply, what then?

I’m just going to file it with all the other stupid-ass things they’ve tried and failed miserably at. It’s an incredibly long list.

You’re underestimating the security risk that this creates.

Those who wrote the bill are, actually, but nice deflection.

When everyone decides not to comply, what then?

Fines and jail time, of course. Especially fines. Gotta secure funding for Congress!

Those who wrote the bill are, actually, but nice deflection.

Then those who wrote the bill can assume the liability.

Fines and jail time, of course. Especially fines. Gotta secure funding for Congress!

Jail time? That’s funny – tell me the last time a company ignored something and someone was put in jail. That’s rarer than a dodo.

And fines? You mean like the ones they use to punish companies for fraudulent or misleading things, where the actual fine is far less then the fraud?

Sure. That’ll scare em.

You’re really giving these toothless morons far more credit than they deserve.

And now you’re seriously underestimatingCongress critters’ hard ons for “Big Tech”.

Nope. I’m simply saying that whoever was supervising the fucktards that wrote the bill are not interested in passing it.

Ain’t gonna happen. Mark my words.

Ain’t gonna happen. Mark my words.

You know what? The exact samething was said about the bill Ron DeSantis wrote to punish Disney for exercising its right to free speech. Guess what? He got to sign it into law.

And keep in mind said bill was delayed to take effect until after the election. So Disney at this point has felt absolutely nothing.

Sadly, most Republican politicians aren’t Ron Wyden.

Because Ron Wyden’s a Democrat. 😎

Most Dems aren’t Wyden, either.

Very few politicians are as informed as Wyden, and almost none of them are as selfless as Wyden.

If they decide to just silently delete your important emails, so you never even see them, you’d be fine with that?

I mean, sometimes important emails do get caught in the spam filter, and so I train the spam filter not to do that any more.

I don’t think Congress has a role in fixing that.

And if you mean what you say more literally, if Google was scanning my email and just outright deleting important ones, then I’d move my important email to another provider — which is one of the nice things about email being based on an open protocol.

Again, no reason for the government to get involved.

The 1st Amendment was enacted to prevent Congress from interfering with political speech…

Including political speech like deciding which, if any, politicians are worth listening to. Gotta clarify that point for the hard of understanding.

The first amendment means you are free from government interference(barring very specific exceptions), it does not mean non-government actors are similarly constrained and it especially doesn’t mean they have to host your speech or provide a platform for it.

The parent message didn’t say that spam filtering violates the first amendment, nor that it would constitute government censorship. It merely said that the intent behind the amendment suggests a course of action here. (I disagree, but am not going to claim they said something they didn’t.)

A spam filter doesn’t, the government stepping in to tell companies that they aren’t allowed to employ a spam filter that impacts political emails very much would.

… said nobody with any comprehension of what the First Amendment and censorship are, ever.

Even more hilarious, in announcing the bill, Senator John Thune, gave a talk about how the Republican’s “vision” for governing was contrasted with the Democrats, because the GOP doesn’t want “more big government” but rather “allowing free markets to work” and having “a light regulatory touch”… and then uses that as the backdrop to introducing this intrusive, big government bill that would allow the government to block the free market of spam filters, in order to give politicians special rights to avoid your spam filter, and to force businesses to have to file tons of busywork reports documenting their spam filters.

‘Let the free market handle it, the government has no business telling companies what do to!’

‘The free market doesn’t like you, and companies are responding appropriately.’

‘Screw the free market then, time for the government to step in and start issuing orders!’

Gotta love the blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty of modern republicans. They want a small government when it comes to telling them what to do but are all for big government when they’re the ones issuing demands.

I’m just off to register my pyramid-scheme-spam-account as a political party. BRB.

I’ll give you my money! Where do I sign up? 😉

“In short, what the Republicans are actually standing for here is “more spam for me, but not for thee” and not allowing spam filters to work properly.

“Once users added in their own preferences, the impact for Gmail effectively disappeared

So yes, Google does default to canning Republicans. However, that can quickly be overridden by white listing the account or clicking the “not spam” link. This is probably because of Google’s over-rising Democrat user base in this country. And it’s international user base being one of the larger ones. Clearly making the US republicans look like spam to the majority of users.

The bigger take-away of that report is why the other companies had such inferior in-trainable filters.

That said: I don’t know if this is necessarily a bad idea. Government communication… including political/election should reach the recipients. If the receiver choose to blacklist that’s their choice. But that shouldn’t be done by some arbitrary ai automation.

However this bill should be paired with a requirement that campaigns use a single web/email address. To make sure choosing to blacklist actually works.

I know, again I don’t fit the average TD reader. I don’t really care about the emails. Stop calling 12 times a day for an automated survey with no do not call/opt out options! All parties! If I hung up on you at 8, 9, 10, noon…19, 20, 21… Stop calling me!

Correction: Gmail (as the service is actually called) does not default to canning Republicans. Gmail defaults to filtering the emails of addresses that send a high amount of emails to any single Gmail address. If one party does that and the other doesn’t, get which one is most likely to get canned? Now add in the data from Gmail users clicking the “spam” button on emails from Republican politicians, and you have the whole picture. Nice try, though, Republican shill.

The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam…

So how am I shilling? It also states:

…Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which flagged more Democratic politicians’ emails as spam …

Now let’s think of why that would be. I don’t know about yahoo, but Microsoft is primarily a business service. Outlook is used by most of the Ftn 500. Google’s Gmail was initially an internal product. Used and trained from the beginning by staff. Then set as a private invite skunk works project. Before slowly being trialed as a semi-public invite beta.

Looking at how automation is trained tells a story, you know?

Oh, google/gmail. You’re only accurate looking at today. I was an internal invite user. At the time it was Google Mail. Having just switched from GoogleMail. At various times it was publicly and privately called Google Mail, GoogleMail, Mail, G-mail, G Mail, and Gmail.

What you may not know is just how strict use rules were and secrecy was at the time. When they decided to go semi-public, the list of things that could get you kicked off the platform, out of the test, was LONG. When this of us invited we’re given the chance to invite other complete outsiders, we did so choosing very carefully. As we were responsible for their actions as well as our own. Automation in spam filters came very early. And was initially trained by a very small mindset.so no, such a default doesn’t surprise me. At all.

Note I didn’t claim some nefarious political bias here! Just recognition of the general lean of the beginnings. Shill? Lmfao.

The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam…

Which was explained by AC, but you refused the data that context. I don’t think the accusation of you being a Republican shill is too far out of left field.

Again, feel free to show I align with an concerns about bias by a private company and I’ll happily own it. The core difference between my view and theirs (Republicans). I see nothing wrong with this factor. Actually, Microsoft not adapting to user input is fare more troublesome!

Personally I don’t believe anything should be flagged by anyone but the user. Spam should be determined by the individual alone.

Republican shill? You’ll be hard pressed to find any evidence of my supporting the Republican platform as a whole. Beyond defence/us-first where I generally agree and taxation, where I agree with the premise but not method? Feel free.

ball is in your court! Prove that idea Or did you miss my non-partisan screaming about anyone who deletes? If you delete you have censored. I hate any and all who think that’s a good plan.

I’m a shill for now one! More than anything I support and demand total complete and unrestricted expression. Free love. Open sex. A ban on public religion. And the right to use religious books to wipe my arse after a good shite. Find a single Republican that believes in that! Shill, bollox! You’re an ignorant coward unwilling to register and stand by your thoughts.

I’m sorry, I realise you’re an insecure excuse of personhood. Too afraid to link any commentary to yourself.

I’m not without feelings and deeply feel for your ilk so insecure in your beliefs.

There’s not a regular user here ignorant to my cross-the-board-beliefs that would ever consider me a Republican. A problem? Yes! Dryly apathetic? No doubt. Gun loving shArp-shooting nutter? Sure. Republican? Not a chance!

I’m going to go eat dinner now. Then Jack off to some Asian strippers dancing in thongs as they run their breasts against each other. Seeing as how my “friend” for the evening nearly got fired because she was caught with my face between her legs on the the bathroom counter, I’ve not done well tonight. $200 in cash made her job safe. Funny, everything has a price

What was that about republicans? If cash didn’t work o would have offered him the best blow job dixk sick of his life. Or more.

I don’t lack empathy when I’m involved. I simply lack interest in others in general.

What was that you were saying?

The R party, partly at fault via Trump, is far too concerned in religion for me. Because I’ll eat your area as much as your cunt or cock.

Religious (read bullshite myth) slavery keeps me far away from the R party as a whole.

What a private company opts for is put to them. Stop being a shite, and a shit. Bias exists. More often by coincidence than intention. Seriously, stop being one of those ignorant freaks and accept reality. You want to counter crap? Speak the truth! Microsoft has a conservative bias. Google has a liberal bias.

It just is. Grow up!

Spam should be determined by the individual alone.

And you inbox becomes unusable, as spammers use botnets and thousands of email addresses to flood everybodies inboxes.Indeed it may not be worth marking an email source as a spammer, because they will be using a different email address the next time they send you an email.

You assholes eat shit. Fucking Communist BBC bastards.

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