Politicians only read Xitter or Facebook, but places like the fediverse or even Reddit are ignored. They should be made aware of what people are saying regarding their decisions. Email is practically invisible and dead for most people as they live on other platforms and nobody will look up the email of some the minister of agriculture. But if somehow we could just @MarineLePen @Orban @KajaKallas anywhere on the web and they’ll get an email in their inbox, I wonder what that would do to public policy…
How would they reply?
Email is very much not dead…
Seriously, who under 30 or even 40 uses email for communicating with people on a regular basis? Email for me is just for two-factor authentication, notifications for everything that isn’t installed as an app on my phone, and spam. I barely ever send anything to anybody. My “sent” folder has maybe 100 things in there from the last 10 years.
Also, it’s not about them replying, it’s about sending a message. They need a signal to see how people are responding to things. A finger on the pulse so to speak. Right now, they only get signals from nutters on Xitter and geriatrics on Facebook. Politics are a big subject on the fediverse and beyond, but politicians barely ever know of it unless a news article comes out about it. Maybe they pay some company to do analysis of what people are saying (Cambridge Analytica), but they aren’t directly exposed to it.
Politicians were surprised during the chat control vote when they suddenly got emails thanks to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ and were saying “it’s undemocratic”. That was however exactly how democracy should work: they suddenly “heard” the voices of people, not lobbyists and were flabberghasted by the fact. We need more people in the face of politicians, virtually and physically.
They don’t actually read their mail anyway, it usually goes to a staffer. At best, the politician gets a summary like “X real emails, Y auto emails, generally bad vibes on CC”. Even the reply will likely be written by the staffer (if not auto generated entirely).
Email still has an important role for professional communications. Contacting your bank or lawyer or any company in an official capacity is usually done via email. This was true of fax in the past which was killed by email, but there really isn’t a replacement for email yet.
They don’t actually read their mail anyway, it usually goes to a staffer. At best, the politician gets a summary like “X real emails, Y auto emails, generally bad vibes on CC”. Even the reply will likely be written by the staffer (if not auto generated entirely).
Yes, and that would be another signal.