Manipulative political discourse undermines voters’ autonomy and thus threatens democracy. Using a newly assembled corpus of more than 100,000 political emails from over 2,800 political campaigns and organizations sent during the 2020 U.S. election cycle, we find that manipulative tactics are the norm, not the exception. The majority of emails nudge recipients to open them by employing at least one of six manipulative tactics that we identified; the median sender uses such tactics 43% of the time. Some of these tactics are well known, such as sensationalistic subject lines. Others are more devious, such as deceptively formatted“From:” lines that attempt to trick recipients into believing that the message is a continuation of an ongoing conversation. Manipulative fundraising tactics are also rife in the bodies of emails. Our data can be browsed atelectionemails2020.org
• We found six tactics that senders use to manipulate recipients into opening emails. The typical sender used at least one manipulative tactic in about 42% of their emails. Most senders — 99% — use them at least occasionally.
• We found 322 entities that shared our email address with other entities but the majority (133/322) had no privacy policy and only about a quarter (77/200) disclosed their email sharing in the privacy policy.