Big Tech CEOs showed up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, but many of us, remembering their efforts to silence right-leaning critics during the Biden years, remain highly skeptical that they were truly supportive of the president or the GOP.
Rightly skeptical, as it turns out. Once again, Google is being accused of “flagging Republican fundraising emails as “dangerous” spam — keeping them from hitting Gmail users’ inboxes — while leaving similar solicitations from Democrats untouched”, according to reporting in the NY Post.
This is not a new issue. The RNC under Ronna McDaniel sued Google accusing it of using its dominance in email delivery to benefit Democrat fundraising, only to have a judge dismiss the case in 2022. (The judge did not rule Google innocent of bias but only that the plaintiffs had not proven intent.) The lawsuit relied on a study done by members of the Computer Science division of North Carolina State University, who reviewed how spam filtering algorithms from the major email delivery organizations (Gmail, Yahoo etc.) treated online solicitations of political candidates during the 2020 election. Here’s a link to that study.
The researchers concluded that “as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left” by retaining “the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while [it] sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam).”
This is not a little bias, this is huge, especially since other research has shown that email solicitations and information are extremely important in determining how people vote. Google denied the allegations, of course, but the study also concluded – even more damning in my view – “that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same.”
That sounds like an intentional tilting of the playing field, which is appalling.
In 2023, while Joe Biden was president, the Federal Election Commission not surprisingly dismissed an RNC complaint accusing Google of discrimination in their spam filters. But the issue has not gone away and now President Trump occupies the Oval Office.
In May, GOP committees sent a letter to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, complaining that Gmail was routing “a substantial number” of the groups’ emails to users’ spam folders. They also added a public comment to the FTC’s ongoing investigation into Big Tech censorship in which they claimed that Google “has weaponized its immense market power over email delivery to deliberately punish conservative groups and silence their political speech.”
Just recently, Targeted Victory, a consulting firm working for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, among others, claimed Google was up to its old tricks, flagging G-mails containing links to the GOP’s fundraising platform WinRed and often sending them directly to spam. As before, solicitations from Dems face no such obstacles.
GOP victims of Google’s interference and political bias have told the company to cut it out; the company’s support team finally acknowledged in an email that “links to WinRed were deemed “suspicious” and flagged with a “red warning banner” alerting users that it was “potentially suspicious or unsafe.”
This is a Big Deal. Gmail accounts for nearly 76 percent of the American email market; GOP groups claim just 30 percent of NRSC emails were successfully delivered to Gmail users’ primary inboxes. According to the GOP committees, the vast majority were routed to the intended recipients’ spam folders.
Previous lawsuits and judges have fallen back on Big Tech’s protections provided by Section 230, the controversial law that shields digital services from lawsuits over third-party content they host. This is not the first time that Section 230 has come to the aid of biased tech firms; perhaps this is the time to undo the blanket immunity provided by that legislation.
In any event, Republicans are in charge. Either through the FEC, the FTC or some other agency, Google must be brought to heel. Or else, they may find growing enthusiasm for breaking up their monopoly over search and dominant position in email. As Obama so eloquently pointed out, “Elections have consequences.”
Let’s hope so.
