Brace for a potential midterm meltdown in your inbox. Emails from certain federal candidates, parties and political action committees will soon be allowed to bypass the spam filters on Gmail and go straight into your inbox. To banish them, you’ll need to click a new unsubscribe button on each and every sender. Google says it’s a pilot program – so far, not being used by any other email providers – to surface campaign emails that some people might want to see.

But this plan is outrageously hostile to the majority of us, who could be forced to dig through a lot more political spam. Who even asked for this? Why, politicians, of course. Democracy depends on a free flow of information. But in our inboxes – and on our phones, democracy is becoming annoying and dangerous. We the users don’t want to be overwhelmed by unwanted political emails, text messages and robocalls – nor do we want to be targeted with misinformation and misleading fundraising appeals.

Google’s plan to help politicians spam you gives us an opportunity to rethink what’s gone awry about campaigning online.

How do we fight back? Rather than give politicians special end runs to our attention, we need to find ways to make politicians more accountable for how they treat our inboxes and our data – and what they say in direct communications with us.

Fonte: Washington Post, 9 de outubro de 2022. Adaptado. https://freemagazines.top/the-washington-post-october-09-2022/