Petition Web Sites Should Stop Spamming Messages

In the past month, I’ve received hundreds of emails and occasional texts, all because I signed a few petitions.

To help try and get support, too many of them would write names of politicians in the “to” field. Tons of people have received such emails, supposedly authored or even sent from left-leaning people such as Nancy Pelosi or Bernie Sanders for left-leaning petitions or right-leaning people such as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis for right-leaning petitions.

Sending unwanted messages is a horrible practice for people who claim they want to bring about positive change for their goals. All the unasked-for emails seem to only make a positive change on the number showing how large my mailbox (or maildir) got!

I would prefer to have opted in myself to get the emails. Furthermore, what is stopping me from using any other method for finding causes to support, such as the web site or an RSS feed?

We should still support good causes, but it is difficult for many to do so with how many petition web sites operate: they will spam you relentlessly unless you remember to “unsubscribe” after signing nearly every petition. They want you in their email lists, and they will potentially sell your email address to others, whether you like it or not.

What we could try doing is requesting that those who manage these petitioning platforms stop the unnecessary email spamming. Better yet, we should ask them not to collect unnecessary personally identifiable data on people solely for marketing purposes that the signers would find to be shady and creepy.

We should try to get our point across by signing petitions that let you opt-in (not opt-out) from such emails or texts and encourage petition writers to reject the platforms that spam emails and texts. We should also ask that once the organizers have your email address or phone number, they do not misuse that data in those same ways.

I am not against petition web sites using the information if the signer consents to receive the messages. For example, the person should get an easily understandable message letting per know “you are signing up to this email list, and we will send x messages per day/week.” Alas, if petition web sites operated this way, we would not need to call for the practice to change.

Petitions should be a tool for making change, not building up a list of emails and phone numbers to spam and possibly sell.

Let’s all help make it that way.


Copyright (C) 2022 Anton McClure
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