Joan McCarter put up an excellent diary this morning, Democratic voters say Democratic fundraising spam is backfiring … highlighting just how bad the problem has gotten recently. Big percentages of Democratic and independent voters are massively frustrated at the spammy & scammy fundraising techniques … that formerly were used only by grifters like Trump and the Republicans, but now are prevalent on our side as well. How in the hell did this happen!?!?
(First — a couple definitions. Spammy is the email you never signed up for. Scammy is the dunning, fake 4x matches, “your COVID test results,” “Problem with ActBlue,” “four more donations from your zip code and Trump will be ARRESTED!” stuff. They’re slightly different problems ... but they often arrive together in one package in your inbox.)
Over the past couple cycles here, certain Democratic consulting firms, candidates & organizations have simply decided that it’s in their best interests to sell, rent, swap & trade your email address around the ecosystem, without bothering to ask you first. So if you’ve contributed to one campaign … you’re going to be emailed by dozens, perhaps hundreds.
The DCCC condones and encourages this practice; it’s my understanding they REQUIRE their endorsed candidates to share email addresses into the pool. OTOH, a lot of progressive candidates do NOT engage in these practices -- most notably Senator Sanders, whose refusal to just hand his entire email list over to the party in 2016 was the cause of much handwringing ...but he made the right call.
It’s a tragedy of the commons problem, in a lot of ways — and we’ve done a couple panels on it at Netroots Nation. Shoutouts to Amy, Lauren, Josh and Murshed for the latest one at #NN22 in Pittsburgh, which was super-interesting.
The pollution of the email ecosystem is also creating big problems for progressive nonprofit organizations across the board, as well. (Until recently, I worked at one of those.) Even if you have strong relationships with your permission-based subscribers and a good frequency & cadence of messaging, it’s super-hard to break through with a donation request when your potential donors are getting barraged like we all are these days. Basically, they’re peeing in the water that we all drink from.
(ActBlue is actually not the root cause of the problem here, contrary to what a lot of people think. All they do is hand your information over to the candidate you donated to. It’s the candidates themselves who decide to share it onwards from there.)
So, what the heck can we do about it? I’ve gone into a lot more details on these points & provided some tools on ethicalemail.org, a site I set up earlier this year to bring visibility to this problem. But in short, here are a few steps we can all take:
- Complain like hell. Complain to the candidates at their town halls, on their facebook pages, directly on Twitter (for as long as that site lasts, ha ha), by mail, whatever. They’re the only ones with the power to tell the consultants to stop...and they won’t do so unless they hear from a lot of us.
- Complain in response to the messages, too — spam-click the emails you didn’t sign up to receive. If enough of us do this, eventually the mailbox providers like Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook will put all those messages where they belong, in the junk folder.
- In the future, donate by check. Seriously. And don’t put your email address on the memo line.
- Especially if you’re a Californian (you have special rights under the CCPA), request that your information be removed from the spammers’ databases. A bit too detailed to go into here in this diary, but, there are some pre-written messages available for you to use here.
Thanks for reading, hope you found this interesting. I’ll post a couple clarifying comments down below … and would be very interested in any other ways y’all can think of to shut this stuff down. Cheers!
