Is Gmail Silencing Republicans?


I have felt the effect of this. I get lots of begging emails from Democrat candidates -- including from Brainless Biden and Camelhead Harris. But it is quite rare for an email from a Republican candidate to come through via Gmail.

Seeing my preference is for the GOP, that is pretty weird. The story below may explain it


It started as strange conflicts sometimes do: with a couple of older people telling their son that something is wrong with their shared email account. “My parents, who have a Gmail account, aren’t getting my campaign emails,” Representative Greg Steube of Florida told Google CEO Sundar Pichai in July 2020, during a congressional hearing that was ostensibly about antitrust law. “My question is, why is this only happening to Republicans?”

Though this exchange was widely regarded as goofy and kind of random, it started a conversation about Republicans’ relationship to the email inbox and Google’s alleged interference with it. This spring, the conflict escalated following the publication of a study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, which found that Gmail sent most emails from “left-wing” candidates to the inbox and most emails from “right-wing” candidates to the spam folder. Over the next couple of months, Republicans in Congress took private meetings with Google’s chief legal officer and railed against the company in public. Then, in June, a group of Republican senators introduced a bill called the Political BIAS Emails Act, which would “prohibit providers of email services from using filtering algorithms to flag emails from political campaigns that consumers have elected to receive as spam.”

This bill hasn’t gone anywhere, partly because Google has made the point moot. Shortly after the bill was introduced, Google asked the Federal Election Commission to review its plan for a pilot program that would allow political campaigns to apply for exemption from spam filtering. (The review was requested to ensure that Google’s program wouldn’t constitute an illegal “in-kind” campaign contribution, which it could have even though it was offered to all political parties.) The Democratic National Committee called the program “unfortunate” and accused Google of succumbing to a “bad-faith pressure campaign,” but the FEC ultimately approved the plan in August. The pilot program is now in full swing; Republicans have gotten their way just ahead of the midterm elections.

https://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/is-gmail-silencing-republicans ?

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