Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 U.S. election cycle

This is a preliminary release of the code and data associated with the research paper "Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 U.S. election cycle".

Authors: Arunesh Mathur, Angelina Wang, Carsten Schwemmer, Maia Hamin, Brandon Stewart, and Arvind Narayanan.

Website: https://electionemails2020.org

Overview

The repository has three primary components:

• analysis/: contains code for our analysis of the manipulative tactics in the from fields and subject lines of the emails.

• email-server/: contains the necessary procedures and code to set up a server and archive incoming emails.

• email-signup/: contains the code of our automated email signup bot that is built upon OpenWPM.

Dataset

The entire dataset of 317,366 emails can be requested here.