> It's not well known that the (US) CAN-SPAM act does not apply to political and religious organizations.
This is because the politicians in office at the time of writing the "CAN-SPAM" act explicitly wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes. As to why religious orgs. also got included, I don't remember -- one wonders if it was simply to obscure the blatant "we are making ourselves above this law" look for exempting themselves from the law.
They (the politicians that time) did the same thing with the "Do Not Call" phone number list, politicians wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes, and then added an exemption for charity orgs. to the law as well.
Google gmail spam algo is heavily trained by users pressing the spam button. Do spammy things , get marked spam by joe average and do it enough and your emails are marked spam, no explicit action required. It also means that most political email is marked as spam.
> Pichai said “there is nothing in the algorithm that has to do with political ideology”
That’s an interesting non-denial: he never actually says the spam algorithm isn’t biased against conservatives. There could well be a bias, because many ML systems have unintended biases. Google could easily answer the question. It’d probably take an hour max to write and run the mapreduce or whatever they use now.
pwg|4 years ago
This is because the politicians in office at the time of writing the "CAN-SPAM" act explicitly wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes. As to why religious orgs. also got included, I don't remember -- one wonders if it was simply to obscure the blatant "we are making ourselves above this law" look for exempting themselves from the law.
They (the politicians that time) did the same thing with the "Do Not Call" phone number list, politicians wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes, and then added an exemption for charity orgs. to the law as well.
CheezeIt|4 years ago
kfprt|4 years ago
"Republican congressman Greg Steube asks Google CEO why his campaign emails are going to spam"
https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2020/jul/29/republi...
novok|4 years ago
User23|4 years ago
That’s an interesting non-denial: he never actually says the spam algorithm isn’t biased against conservatives. There could well be a bias, because many ML systems have unintended biases. Google could easily answer the question. It’d probably take an hour max to write and run the mapreduce or whatever they use now.