The New York Post reported this week that Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., has returned (or never left) a politically discriminatory activity that it deployed in 2023:
The search giant has been caught this summer flagging Republican fundraising emails as “dangerous” spam — keeping them from hitting gmail users’ inboxes — while leaving similar solicitations from Democrats untouched, a consulting firm warned.
That’s despite repeatedly sparking headlines and lawsuits in recent years over the allegedly partisan practice. Last year, a federal judge tossed a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee that complained of biased email filtering….
Targeted Victory – whose clients include the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn – said it observed that the “serious and troubling” trend was still going on as recently as June and July of this year.
Gmail has been flagging emails containing links to the fundraising platform WinRed and “in many cases, sending them directly to spam,” according to a copy of the memo to clients exclusively obtained by The Post.
Meanwhile, Targeted Victory conducted tests in which emails containing links to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue were delivered without issue. The memo included video demonstrations of the firm’s tests.
“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the memo said.
NLPC called attention to Google’s email censorship activities when we presented a shareholder proposal at Alphabet that called for the company to report on “the vulnerabilities of its enforcement of Google’s and YouTube’s Terms of Service related to content policies, and assessing the risks posed by content management controversies related to issues such as election interference, freedom of expression, and inequitable application of policies, and how they affect the Company’s finances, operations, and reputation.”
As evidence of Google’s gaming of the online political playing field, we cited the following examples in our proposal:
- A study of voter outreach by 2020 political candidates, conducted by North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science, found that Google’s Gmail “marked 59.3% more emails from [conservative] candidates as spam compared to the [progressive] candidates.”
- The Republican National Committee claimed that Gmail sent more than 22 million of its emails to spam during a critical fundraising period in the 2022 election cycle. The Company has incurred a lawsuit and a complaint to the Federal Elections Commission due to the alleged suppression.
- A Media Research Center analysis of the most tightly contested 2022 U.S. Senate races found that ten of 12 Republican candidates’ campaign websites (83%) appeared far lower (or did not appear at all) on page one of Google’s organic search results, compared to their Senate Democratic Party opponents’ campaign websites.
The previous year we presented a shareholder proposal that sought an itemization of requests the company received from government officials to remove content from its online platforms. Both Google and YouTube, as Alphabet subsidiaries, were under fire for taking down conservatives’ content and deplatforming many of them.
Despite CEO Sundar Pichai‘s (pictured above) schmoozing of the Trump administration, clearly nothing has changed when it comes to political censorship and election interference at Alphabet.
