Google Looks to Appease GOP on Gmail Filtering for Campaign Messages
Google is reportedly looking to appease Republican senators who claimed that Gmail disproportionately filters campaign messages sent by members of their party.
Google "has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up in spam folders," Axios reports(Opens in a new window), by making them "exempt from spam detection as long as they don't violate Gmail's policies around phishing, malware, or illegal content."
Google confirmed that it's taking action on campaign emails in a statement to PCMag:
"We want Gmail to provide a great experience for all of our users, including minimizing unwanted email, but we do not filter emails based on political affiliation. We recently asked the FEC to authorize a pilot program that may help improve inboxing rates for political bulk senders and provide more transparency into email deliverability, while still letting users protect their inboxes by unsubscribing or labeling emails as spam. We look forward to exploring new ways to provide the best possible Gmail experience."
The report arrives shortly after the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting (BIAS) Emails Act was introduced(Opens in a new window) by US Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and 26 other Republican senators on June 15.
The recursively named bill(Opens in a new window) would make it "unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account for a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to supply such a label."
Axios reports that Google plans to placate the senators by making it so that "when users would receive an email from a campaign for the first time, they would get a
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