Republicans sue Google over Gmail election spam plan
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The Republican National Committee (RNC) has criticized Google’s efforts, which the tech giant says are designed to prevent political emails from ending up in spam folders.
According to axiosthe group says Google’s plans aren’t doing enough to prevent automatic filtering, and now they plan to sue the tech giant in California.
According to the allegation, Google has “redirected millions of RNC emails en masse to the spam folders of potential donors and supporters during pivotal points in election fundraising and community building.”
Gmail Political Email Filtering
The RNS claims to have observed normal delivery of its emails during most parts of the month, with many of its emails going to spam towards the end of the month. They say that “this month-end period is historically the period when the RNC’s fundraising is most successful.”
After criticism that more Republican content than Democratic content was filtered as spam, Google launched a pilot program in September 2022 that would initially require users to mark emails from political campaigns as spam, in the hopes that more political campaign emails would increase. would be delivered directly to users’ mailboxes. The feature would then provide a more prominent ‘unsubscribe’ button for users to unsubscribe.
A Google spokesperson told axios that “Gmail’s spam filters reflect users’ actions,” but after more than nine months of discussions, the RNC says the issue is still unresolved.
However, the publication noted that the RNC has not subscribed to Gmail’s spam filtering pilot program, which is designed to fix these types of errors.
The ability for emails from political campaigners to bypass the email service’s spam filtering was granted by the Federal Election Commission in August. When the feature was rolled out, eligible commissions were able to register their entry under Google’s terms and requirements.
Through axios (opens in new tab)