The Federal Election Commission has rejected a complaint from Republican organizations that claimed Google unjustly targeted GOP fundraising operations by classifying emails sent by GOP donors as spam at a rate that was significantly higher than emails sent by Democrats.
Last Monday, the FEC informed Google that the government had “found no basis to believe” the Republican allegations. According to The Wall Street Journal, the agency stated that any disparity in the classification of Democratic and Republican fundraising emails as spam was unintentional.
“The Commission’s bipartisan ruling to dismiss this case underscores that Gmail does not censor communications for political objectives,” said Google spokesperson José Castaeda. “We’ll continue to make investments in our Gmail industry-leading spam filters because, as the FEC points out, they’re critical to keeping people’s inboxes free of unwanted, unsolicited, or harmful communications.”
In April, the RNC filed an Federal Election Commission complaint against Google. The GOP group highlighted a March 2022 study conducted by experts from North Carolina State University’s Dept. of Computer Science.
“The study’s findings are alarming,” according to the RNC complaint. “All three systems showed some discrepancy, with Outlook classifying Democrat emails as spam 27% more than GOP emails and Yahoo classifying Democrat emails as spam 14% more. In comparison though, Google’s Gmail truly stands out, as it categorized Republican emails as spam at a rate that was more than 820% greater than it marked emails from Democratic candidates.”
“Moreover, as Election Day approached, Gmail’s imbalance intensified, with the percentage of Republican candidate emails categorized as spam increasing while the percentage of Democrat emails designated as spam remained consistent,” the report says. “The study also discovered that Gmail continued to flag Republican emails as spam even after consumers opened and read comparable communications. This implies that Gmail effectively stopped users from getting communications from GOP candidates, even after those users indicated a desire to receive them.”
The FEC decided that the disparity was not deliberate; rather, it was caused by Google’s spam filter, which is designed to detect malware, phishing schemes, and other abusive or hazardous online activity.
“Though the NCSU report appears to illustrate a differential impact from Google’s spam filter, it specifically acknowledges that its authors have ‘no basis to suspect that there were purposeful attempts from these email providers to generate these biases to influence who voters voted for,” the FEC wrote to Google.
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