After All That Nonsense… Republicans Aren’t Even Using The Spam Backdoor They Forced Google To Create
Do you remember all the nonsense from earlier this year, in which executives from the Republicans' favorite spamming operation misread a study about how various email providers handled political mailings and absolutely flipped out? The study didn't say what they claimed it said: that Google was nefariously sending GOP emails to spam filters. It showed that in an untrained inbox, Google was more likely to declare Republican political messages as spam than Democratic political messages (the same study also showed the opposite for Outlook and Yahoo Mail - those sent more Dem emails to spam than Republicans, but nobody complained about that). Of course, the same study showed that this differential in Gmail went away for anyone who trained their spam filter.
Of course, there was also the fact that Republican emails also... are way more spamlike. Even some of their biggest supporters admit that. Also, their tech talent is weaker, as we noted in a story about how Senator Marco Rubio lost his shit at Google... and only afterwards found out it was because his own tech team botched their email configuration, rather than Google doing anything nefarious.
Either way, Google (somewhat stupidly) caved in to this nonsense pressure after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would require all email providers whitelist political spam. In response, Google put forth a pilot program that would whitelist spam from recognized political candidates. The pilot program had to get FEC approval to make sure it wasn't seen as an illegal in-kind contribution, which allowed the world to weigh in on the program, and they all, almost universally, hated the idea. Of course, the FEC's determination was based solely on whether or not this was an in-kind contribution (it was not), and thus (begrudgingly) allowed the program to move forward.
So, now that the program has been in effect, I guess it's time to check in on all those Republicans who demanded exactly this in order to make sure their spam messages go through. And... it turns out that exactly none of them have signed up for the pilot program, according to some reporting by Makena Kelly at The Verge:
A source familiar with the matter confirmed to The Verge that, nearly a month after the pilot's launch, the RNC has not joined or even applied for the program, even as the party continues to mount political and possibly legal pressure against Google. The RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the committee's decision to abstain from the pilot program.
Perhaps part of the problem is that Google made it clear that it would remove any participant if more than 5% of their whitelisted emails were then flagged as spam, and GOP candidates and their spamming partners know there's no way they can keep their emails so unspammy that they won't all be designated as spam anyway.
As that article notes, it's just a simple fact that Republicans seem to go a bit overboard on the spammy nature of their emails:
The volume of emails sent to individuals by the RNC has risen steadily as the midterms approach, according to data collected by the Archive of Political Emails and viewed by The Verge. Throughout 2020, the organization sent only one or two emails in a day - but by the end of the next year, it was common to see more than 10 emails in a single day and still increasing. For October 2022, the data shows 80 different fundraising calls sent in just the first seven days of the month.
The content of the RNC's messages can also resemble spam, using misleading subject lines, excessive punctuation, and intimidating language around deadlines to encourage donors to send money immediately upon receiving the message. As part of the January 6th hearings, congressional investigators argued that former President Donald Trump raised more than $250 million for an Election Defense Fund to overturn the 2020 election results that never existed. While the money went to Trump and not the RNC, the committee often structures its emails in a similar style to the Trump campaign.
While the Verge article presents various theories as to why the Republicans haven't signed up, the real answer is likely that it's way more valuable for Republicans to play victims and to pretend that big tech is censoring us!" as a messaging strategy, than to actually be part of the whitelist program. Republican officials make some excuses as to why they haven't signed up, arguing that the program doesn't do enough, but what Republicans really seem to want are big Fox News headlines whining about how censored they are by Google, rather than to actually use this program, which would only prove that it's not Google that's the problem, but their own email techniques and practices.
Of course, as the Verge piece also notes, Fox News story reveals that the GOP is just... bad at handling email:
In that same story, the RNC also confirmed that it only updated its message segmentation to factor in recency of click, petition signature, and donation" last month. Email segmentation is standard for both political and commercial email programs, taking into account how often a recipient engages with messages before sending the email to them at all. (The RNC did not respond to requests for comment to clarify its email segmentation practices.)
It's absolutely standard practice and has been for over a decade to suppress what we call the inactive people.' Maybe they haven't actually gotten around to unsubscribing, but they're not really interested anymore," Will Bunnett, principal at the digital firm Clarify Agency, said, describing the practice. If the RNC just started doing that, they're well over a decade behind."