Report from the Reuters
In Brief – The Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned Google that the regulator has received complaints that its Gmail spam filters are treating email from Republicans and Democrats differently, allegedly blocking Republican fundraising and communications emails at a much higher rate that similar Democratic material. Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s letter warns the company that “partisan” email spam filters could be illegal. Ferguson initiated a process earlier in the year to gather public comments on what he calls “tech platform censorship” and says that the Gmail spam filter issue surfaced there. He also referenced a media report that included claims from political consulting firm Targeted Victory that Gmail flags emails with “WinRed” fundraising links as spam more often than Democrat-aligned fundraising emails. Google denied the allegations and said in a statement that, “Gmail’s spam filters look at a variety of objective signals – like whether people mark a particular email as spam, or if a particular ad agency is sending a high volume of emails that are often marked by people as spam. This applies equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”
Context – Alleged online censorship is the most unifying digital policy concern of US conservatives. Republican suspicion of Big Tech firms run by Bay Area progressives is deep and longstanding. In 2020, Pew reported that 90% of Republicans suspected ideological motives behind platform decisions. In 2022, researchers at North Carolina State University released a paper claiming that during the 2020 election campaign Google’s spam filter appeared to identify Republican fundraising emails as spam to a far greater degree than Democratic emails. Following Republican complaints to Google leaders, the company created an opt-in program for campaign emails in the fall of 2022, but it was discarded in 2023 after the RNC refused to participate. The Federal Election Commission, with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners, later rejected a formal Republican complaint and a federal court dismissed a parallel Republican lawsuit.