Spam doesn't include politics

There's a fair old amount of huffing going on at the moment about what is or isn't spam, especially e-mails from political parties.

While some e-mails are clearly spam, others are harder to categorise. Contact about political issues, or from political parties, is one such dilemma.

If someone sends me an e-mail about a missing person, I feel a little churlish complaining to them (and the world) that it's spam. If someone sends me a mail about a vote (or something) that's happening in the Dail -- such on the cervical vaccine -- again, I feel a little uncomfortable about shouting them down because I didn't consent to their sending me an e-mail. Yet this is a political issue: and I did not give my consent receiving the mail.

So is a political party sending me an e-mail about an issue regarded as unacceptable spam, where the aforementioned incidents aren't? On balance, probably not.

If I don't want to be contacted again -- if I want to be side-stepped in the political canvassing process -- by a political party, I can tell them so. I can 'unsubscribe', if you will. "But that's not the way spam is regulated, you shouldn't have to unsubscribe from companies' spam -- why should political parties be any different?"

Well, political parties are different.

People have a right to stand on a soapbox with a megaphone and shout or complain about an issue they feel strongly about. They have the same right -- as irritating as it sometimes is -- to send us letters doing the same thing, based on the electoral register

For this reason, we recognise that political parties have a (limited) right to pitch ideas and concepts to citizens. They're given direct access to the airwaves at election time. They're allowed stick posters up on lamposts. Are ordinary companies given this public access? Are they allowed stick posters up all over the place? No. So why do we let political parties do this? Because we differentiate them from commercial companies.

So how is sending an e-mail different?

There is a second issue, too. If I write a blog where I comment, analyse, criticise and praise all sorts of issues, including political ones, how outraged should I be if a political party decides to send me an (unsolicited) e-mail on something? Not very much, I would have thought.

Make no mistake, getting an e-mail from a party can be bloody irritating. But it has to be a different class of thing to spam from a company. (Unless you're ultra cynical and believe that political parties are simply in it to make money ie keeping themselves and their cronies in a job.)

Comments

[Jason O'Mahony]

I agree. Political parties are different, and the vehicle by which our social choices are made. If you don't like what's on offer, set up your own one. Don't want to? That's ok too, because it gives those of us who are politically active more power to shape both our own life and indeed your life.
Having said that, in the US both the Dems and the GOP are working on matching emails to registered voters. There will come a time when they won't even bother spamming people who don't vote. So don't worry, the political spamming will stop, because you are not worth it. Your opinion simply won't matter, because in their eyes you're nobody.

[Justin Mason]

I disagree. There's nothing about political mail that makes it non-spam.

Remember the German virus that caused infected victims to send out millions of anti-immigrant neo-nazi spam? That was political spam.

Every time US election season rolls around, there's a new batch of reports of spams advertising some senator or another -- http://spamvertized.org/ has a few from 2006, for example. So much for targeted mails... these guys often hit my accounts and I don't even live in the same _country_.

When the US lawmakers made CAN-SPAM, they were careful to omit themselves from its purview, but that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

For what it's worth, I have a little authority on this topic -- cf. http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin/trunk/CREDITS . ;) We in the anti-spam industry have generally settled on a single workable definition for spam -- Unsolicited Bulk Email. Not "Commercial", or "Non-political" -- just "Unsolicited" and "Bulk".

Michele certainly was fighting the good fight over on his blog on this point...

[Jason O'Mahony]

" We in the anti-spam industry...."
I see. Well, we in the democratic republic called Ireland, of which, as a voter, I have a little authority, see what the Greens did as being different.
I've seen the other side of campaigns, like Lisbon last year, when the public complained that they did not receive ENOUGH information.
The fact is, this isn't selling viagra or codding people as to how to get a bigger mickey, this is how the country is run. A democracy needs well informed voters to work.

[Adrian]

Justin,

Don't you think that a politician has a right to approach you to communicate a policy or an idea?

You make a good point about the nazi stuff, but isn't that a bit removed the the context in which all this is being discussed?

Should it really be against the law for a party to contact someone over e-mail?

[Justin Mason]

'Don't you think that a politician has a right to approach you to communicate a policy or an idea?'

If I previously indicated my interest in the topic, by contacting the politician or signing a petition, yes. But if it's "out of the blue", unsolicited contact, I don't think so. It's not good for them to *assume* that I'm interested, and the onus shouldn't be on me to indicate that I'm not interested (ie. unsubscribe). That might work OK with a small number of politicians mailing me, but it fails to scale very quickly.

Fair point about the nazi stuff -- a malware-generated spam flood is not the same thing as Greens posting from their GMail account. But my point is that political speech in itself isn't nonspam by definition. And let's say we restrict the political=nonspam definition to political parties -- would you be happy to give carte blanche to a far-right anti-immigrant party, a la the National Front in the UK, to send unsolicited mail to voters?

'Should it really be against the law for a party to contact someone over e-mail?'

It's _not_ against the law to contact someone by mail. You just have to establish that they _want_ those mails, first...

'I've seen the other side of campaigns, like Lisbon last year, when the public complained that they did not receive ENOUGH information.'

In my opinion, there was plenty of info on Lisbon floating about -- it just wasn't comprehensible. I don't think spamming would have helped.

(PS: Adrian, is there any way to subscribe to receive notifications when new comments are posted? some kind of plugin for the blogging software you're using? it'd be handy... ;)

[Yourtech]

Justin,

I'll sort that comments thing out. Thanks for letting me know about it.

On the issue at hand, how practical is it for you to let a politician know that you're amenable to receiving their policy pitches? Every single one? Including the Independents? So a guy running for the local elections first has to conduct a massive -- and expensive -- canvassing operation just to establish a basic position of who he is allowed to contact? Isn't that a bit impractical?

If the answer to this is: "let them set up a subscription service and anyone who consents to be contacted by politicians can sign up for it", won't that place political discussion into the hands of a tiny elite, or niche, who become informed on issues? Surely that's inimical to the idea of a participative democracy?

And then, what defines a politician? Purely membership of a political party? Does it also include advocates in a referendum, for example, who may have no party allegiance?

The Lisbon referendum is a good point in case. Most people, when pushed, probably don't know what EXACTLY Lisbon does or doesn't establish (save the bit about the Commissioner being axed). Is it better to allow politicians try and improve this understanding through contacting voters or stand off completely and end up with the current low level of comprehension?

On the BNP point, the point you're raising is as much a freedom of speech thing as an e-mail or spam thing. If you accept that the BNP has a right to exist and a right to contest elections and a right to participate in general political discussion, then you probably have to accept that they also have a right to canvas voters (however revolting they may be).