The Republican National Committee has sued Google over “political bias” on its email platform, Gmail. The party claimed that conservative candidates’ emails are being automatically sorted into Gmail’s spam folders.
“We need to find a way to keep big tech’s thumb off the scale in our elections and our democracy,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said. “Because they should not be able to suppress emails that we’re sending to people who asked for us to send these emails.”
Google denied the accusations, saying it does not filter emails based on political affiliation. However, it does filter based on users’ actions through “spam filtering algorithms” (SFAs). They are designed to recognize undesired, unsolicited, or suspicious emails, then redirect them into the spam folder.
Apparently, those algorithms can favor one political party’s messages and hide another’s as spam.
A 2020 North Carolina State University study found political biases in Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo’s SFAs. Gmail, specifically, leaned to the left by marking 59.3% more emails from conservative candidates as spam. Google reportedly pushed back, reiterating to Fox News that politics has no bearing on mail classifications in Gmail.
In April, the RNC asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate. The commission approved a Google pilot program called the “Verified Sender Program.” It allows participants to bypass the spam filter – unless the user opts out of receiving future messages.
