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The Republican Party may win war against Google over dumping GOP mail in spam folders

July 30, 2022 | | Print Article

The Republican Party has reportedly won its war against Google over its spam policy, and apparently, the media isn’t thrilled.

“Google is working on a way to ensure emails from US political campaigns reach users’ Gmail inboxes instead of automatically getting dumped into the spam folder,” according to an Engadget report filed late last month.

“The company has asked the Federal Election Commission for approval on a plan to make emails from ‘authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC’ exempt from spam detection, as long they abide by Gmail’s rules on phishing, malware and illegal content.”

But this, according to Democrats and their media allies, is a very bad thing.

Stopping campaign emails from going into people’s spam folders “could reshape the experience of Gmail users,” The Washington Post ominously warned Friday.

“The amount of political fundraising conducted over email and text has exploded in recent years, adding to the deluge of promotional messages swamping Americans every day. The program could further intensify the inundation,” the Post added.

This has been a longtime issue that first began receiving publicity in 2016, when supporters of then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump began complaining that his campaign emails were being funneled into their spam folders.

The issue resurfaced again this past spring when North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science published a study revealing that Google’s Gmail was disproportionately shunting emails from conservative sources to the spam folder.

The study specifically “found that Gmail sent 77 percent of right-wing candidate emails to spam, compared with 10 percent of left-wing candidate emails,” the Post, to its credit, admits.

In response to the study, the Republican Party effectively declared war on Google.

“By the end of April, the GOP’s three main party committees had filed a complaint against Google with the FEC, citing the North Carolina State study and alleging ‘Illegal In-Kind Contributions Made by Google to Biden For President and Other Democrat Candidates,'” according to the Post.

“Around the same time, representatives from the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and from a leading GOP digital strategy firm, Targeted Victory, briefed senators on the party’s poor performance with Gmail inboxes.”

And then in May, Senate Republicans invited Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, out to lunch so he could “explain the company’s spam detection systems and answer questions.”

The meeting was reportedly “tense.”

“Walker reiterated to senators that filtering bias is unrelated to political affiliation and pointed out that the North Carolina State researchers said the discrepancies likely have to do with Gmail’s weighing of ‘past user behavior,’ meaning Gmail marks emails as spam based on how users have marked emails before,” Politico reported at the time.

The GOP senators apparently didn’t believe them.

One senator who attended the meeting described it as “short of hostile, but confrontational.”

The following month, top House Republicans proposed legislation to stop Google from funneling GOP campaign emails into people’s spam folder.

The Political BIAS Emails Act would, if ever signed into law, “prohibit large email platforms like Google’s Gmail from using filtering algorithms on emails sent from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the email account took action to apply a label such as spam.”

It’d also “allow political campaigns to request a report on information specific to the individual campaign including the total number of emails that reached the intended recipient’s primary inbox,” and “require large email platforms to provide political campaigns best practices on steps the campaign can take to increase the number of emails reaching a recipient’s primary inbox.”

The combined pressure worked, and Google is now trying to make amends. But as noted earlier, the left isn’t pleased. To hear them tell it, Republicans have effectively bamboozled Google — as if they’re the ones who did something wrong:

It’s not clear what being white has to do with Google’s spam policy.

According to Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, on the same day that the Post published its hit piece on Republicans, Google re-upped its alleged censorship.

Look:

Vivek Saxena
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