GOP Bill Will Try to Stop Gmail From Sending Campaign Messages to Spam
Republican senators plan on introducing a bill today that seeks to stop email providers from automatically sending campaign messages to the spam filter, arguing it’s a form of censorship.
US Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) brought up the issue in a press conference, saying(Opens in a new window) his legislation would “go after and prohibit” major email providers from “censoring or discriminating against political emails.”
How the bill would work remains unclear. But Thune pointed fingers at Google’s Gmail service by citing a study(Opens in a new window) from North Carolina State University, which examined whether the spam filters for major email providers had a bias against campaign messages from political candidates sent during the 2020 election.
The study found: “Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates, whereas Outlook and Yahoo marked 20.4% and 14.2% more emails from left candidates as spam compared to the right candidates, respectively.”
Other Republican Senators have also pounced(Opens in a new window) on the study as evidence Gmail is targeting GOP campaign emails. But ironically, the authors behind the research say Republican lawmakers have taken their findings out of context.
One of the authors told(Opens in a new window) The Washington Post their study found the spam filter bias of Gmail decreases significantly once a user begins manually marking and unmarking email messages as spam. In addition, the study found no evidence Google was deliberating trying to filter out email messages to influence the 2020 election.
Importantly, the study noted it's possible users themselves were influencing Gmail’s spam-filtering algorithms by manually flagging
Read more on pcmag.com
