Have you interacted with any political organizations in the last 10 years offline? If/when you interact with them online, do they claim provenance through some actual recognized body or just some vagaries around how they want to depict their alignments?
If this was such a big deal, where is the hubbub about pretty much every email in my inbox?
NGPVan (for instance, on the Dem side) doesn't require much except the bare minimum of legal registration for political organizations, I don't buy that what is essentially a "marketplace for voters' email addresses" suddenly legitimizes anyone who signs up for their service.
My point is, if this is a problem, it has been one for a long time and the cultural zeitgeist seems to have simply ignored this except in cases that can be used to demonize enemies.
Nobody likes e-mail spam from anonymous groups. NGPVan has an about page that lists who runs it with photos, they have an office and a phone number, they have a Wikipedia page. But they don't legitimize anyone else, as you seem to be suggesting.
Anonymous interference like this hasn't been a problem for a long time, contrary to your assertion -- it's very specific to this and the past two elections, because it's a tactic especially used by foreign influence like Russia. And this isn't about "demonizing enemies", it's about identifying illegal foreign influence, which is a very real thing.
NGPVan doesn't email you with influence campaigns -- their customers do. You are completely mistaken to believe their legal team hasn't insulated themselves from the activities of those who pay rent on their infrastructure.
The original point was it's typically not difficult to know who is behind legitimate things when political influence is involved. Nathaniel Pearlman in the instance of NGPVan, unknown entities in the instance of this conversation, or am I mistaken?
> Have you interacted with any political organizations in the last 10 years offline?
No, I haven’t. Honestly surprised at myself but post-2014 the answer is straight-up no.
When I interact with them online (or, especially lately, by getting text spam), I assume astroturf until proven otherwise. I’m having trouble coming up with an example of a campaign that has succeeded at proving otherwise.
If this was such a big deal, where is the hubbub about pretty much every email in my inbox?
NGPVan (for instance, on the Dem side) doesn't require much except the bare minimum of legal registration for political organizations, I don't buy that what is essentially a "marketplace for voters' email addresses" suddenly legitimizes anyone who signs up for their service.
My point is, if this is a problem, it has been one for a long time and the cultural zeitgeist seems to have simply ignored this except in cases that can be used to demonize enemies.