The Federal Trade Commission is going after Amazon for allegedly using dark patterns to keep people subscribed to Amazon Prime, presumably against their wills. Dark patterns are “practices … that can trick or manipulate consumers into buying products or services or giving up their privacy,” according to an FTC report . The practices are effective but often unethical and, according to the FTC, sometimes illegal.

As I explain below, recent studies cast doubt on the legitimacy of the FTC’s case against Amazon—and some of the worst offenders are the FTC’s political enablers. Perhaps the FTC should help the Federal Election Commission (FEC) go after the dark pattern practices of the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, and some of their candidates and political action committees (PACs).

Dark patterns include using “advertisements designed to look like independent, editorial content,” driving urgency with fake countdown timers, falsely identifying the sender of unsolicited emails, making it difficult to cancel subscriptions or charges, burying key terms of service and junk fees, and tricking consumers into sharing data. The FTC’s press release lists several FTC dark pattern cases, including Effen Ads, LLC (iCloudWorx) for “misleading spam emails;” Age of Learning, Inc. (ABCmouse) for “negative option marketing and billing practices;” and VIZIO, Inc. for collecting viewing data on VIZIO smart TVs “without consumers’ knowledge or consent.”

The FTC’s Amazon complaint is heavily redacted, so it’s hard to know whether the FTC has the goods on Amazon. But even if the accusations are true, there are many companies that are worse than Amazon. A 2023 study investigated 40 companies and found that 26 used the dark pattern technique of making it overly hard for consumers to cancel their services. This is the FTC’s major complaint against Amazon. Amazon is in the list of offenders, but a number of well-known companies are worse, including the New York Times. It took at least 21 clicks to unsubscribe from the Times. That is over three times the six clicks that the FTC complains that it takes to leave Amazon Prime. Only 4 of the 40 companies in the study required fewer than six clicks to unsubscribe.

A study of 11,000 shopping websites found that nearly 2,000 use dark patterns but didn’t name names. A study of 105 popular online services found 2,320 instances of dark patterns and each service used at least one. Amazon Prime was an offender in the study, but so were eBay, CBS News, TikTok, and ESPN. And only 4 of the 105 online services used fewer dark pattern practices than Amazon.com.

Investigating the approximately 2,000 companies examined in these studies would keep the FTC quite busy. But perhaps it could put some resources into helping the FEC pursue some of the worst offenders of all: Democrat and Republican political campaigns, parties, and PACs.

A study of 300,000 political emails during the 2020 election cycle found that manipulative tactics were the norm. “From” fields were formatted to “create the false impression the message is a continuation of an ongoing conversation.” The study also documented “disclosures of email addresses between senders in violation of privacy policies and recipients’ expectations.” It also found that “37 [%] of the median sender’s emails use a clickbait subject line, 5 [%] use a dark pattern user interface tactic, and 42 [%] use at least one tactic of either type.”

A database of about 950,000 political emails from 16,082 senders finds that 99% use dark patterns, 42% of emails contain at least one dark pattern tactic, and that Democrats tend to send twice as many emails as Republicans.

Research at the Guardian found that tactics for political text messages mirror those for emails. The Guardian and other sources also found the manipulative email and text language feeds divisive politics. Messages weaponize guilt, include “nonexistent deadlines and false claims of donation matching,” and demonize the other side.

Deception in business and politics is wrong. But it seems there are bigger fish to fry than Amazon when it comes to dark patterns in marketing.

This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.