Although politicians and law-making is not something I usually would write about, it is something I just found interesting.

I think by now everyone who has an e-mail address has come in to contact with spam e-mails. Usually they are sent to sell you something or do some phishing. But as it turns out sending spam e-mails can also make politicians vote in certain ways.

A few days ago, I happened to hear a old recording of a radio show that had multiple politicians as guests. And Indrek Tarand an Estonian representative at the EU was one of them. When the topic of the new “EU copyright bill” came up, he did something that I wasn’t expecting. He completely baffled me with his reasoning behind his decision.

Namely, he said he voted for the bill, because the people who are against the bill supposedly used AI to send spam to him to try make him vote against it. And voting for the new law was his way of reacting to the hundreds of e-mails he got.

So as it turns out, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to lobby a politician in to voting some way. Just try and press the right buttons by sending them spam e-mails. They might just vote your way just because you spammed them not to do it.