Since 2019 I've been finding that a lot of my personal emails to close friends (even) are not being delivered to their inbox. In fact my closest friend, with whom I exchange emails daily, often finds that my email messages end up in her (AOL) Spam Folder. Both she and I have taken measures to prevent this, such as her adding me to her Contacts list and vice versa. But even these measures seem not always effective. Some fraction of emails continue to get identified as spam, for no obvious reason.
I have attempted to be a local organizer, reaching out to paid members from lists given to me from the national office, but it often seems that people do not get my email messages anymore after receiving maybe one or two messages, if they ever got any at all.
Another close friend who now lives in France (but uses German GMX mail service) has had my emails bounce occasionallJy (for "policy" violations) for years, but the problem has grown more and more acute, with a high percentage of my emails bouncing nowadays. Even short and sweet messages with no bad or suspicious words of one sentence might bounce. It's unpredictable which will bounce and which will not. At least some go through. When they bounce, I get a message from GMX telling me so. With other recipients like my nearby friend, I get no indication that my message was identified as Spam.
Obviously I find this to be a very serious problem. I communicate mostly and often best through email. And the email system has been turning against me.
But it's not just me. In my Spam folder I'm endlessly finding people and groups I value and support having been wrongly identified as Spam. Here's a short list of senders I found in my Yahoo spam folder today:
The New Republic (I'm a subscriber)
AUSCS (I've been a donor)
Just Foreign Policy
Daily KOS (I'm a new donor)
Friends of The Earth (I'm a donor)
truthout (Once was a donor)
JusticeDemocrats (I'm a donor)
Bold Progressives (I'm a donor)
Warnock (I was a donor)
PCCC (I was a donor)
Squad Victory Fund (I am a donor)
So now the contours of an information lockdown are revealed. We have an efficient method of person to person communication, even one person to many people communication. First it gets clogged by endless people trying to make a buck. So next we have to add filters to keep those spammers at bay. But the filters designed to keep spammers at bay also interrupt desired organizing communications and even single friend communications. If this wasn't a conspiracy to destroy left organizing, to further atomize individuals, it sure seems like it has that effect.
Elsewhere, many people I follow and have followed are up in arms about censorship in Social Media. Many even see the deplatforming of Trump as a slippery slope. I see it as the belated application of the law which has properly defined the First Ammendment.
I never much cared for Social Media and still don't. I never saw it as a useful organizing tool. I understood implicitly that it would freely be used to amplify conservative and right wing memes and disinformation and shut down left information and truth. Only in recent years have I even bothered to use Social Media much. I imagined Facebook as being only about sharing Cat photos. Now I try to post petitions and the like daily. But it's still a sideshow for me, and I don't believe I would care much even if I were banned. (With Blogger being an exception, if you consider Blogger social media.) Sure, Social Media has resulted in Regime Change in a few countries, but only with assistance from covert operators like CIA who use other means of communication.
Email is different. Email has been critical to my personal (and professional) communication for 40 years. If I had to chose telephone or email I'd choose email in a heartbeat. People who prefer to use the telephone seem like thugs and high pressure salesmen to me. They want to have you on the line so they can force you to change your line right then and there...perfectly consistent with Imperialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment