Current events and filters

That was a longer than intended hiatus from blogging. I’ll be honest, though, talking about email just seemed so trivial in the face of what was and is continuing to happen. I posted this over on slack, earlier, and Steve pointed out I should make it public on the blog. It’s as good a way as any to come back to the blog.

With everything going on in the US, people are applying the brakes to some types of content and speech.  These are not, at the moment, going to be nuanced or careful. They’re trying to stop violence, insurrection and sedition. This is potentially a place of ‘block it all and we’ll sort it out later’

I think folks should expect filters to tighten down on content – particularly political content – in the next few days and lasting for at least a few weeks. I don’t think this will be permanent and I don’t know that it’s going to affect email as much as social media and advertising. But I do think that some email systems will be affected.

There’s also a lot coming out of the martech end of things (look at what Nandini and her crew are coming out with particularly with how much fraud is in the ad networks, see https://branded.substack.com for details and links to news articles). One of the things she isn’t saying, but which is blindingly obvious to me, is a lot of the same people running the fraudulent ad networks are also in email – they’re your affiliate marketers and co-reg vendors. The fallout from the work she and her group are doing will spill into email, too.