Google has been sued in the US by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for allegedly sending “millions” of campaign emails to the spam folders of users.
In the lawsuit filed in the Eastern District Court in California, the committee accused Google of “throttling its email messages because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views”.
According to Axios, the RNC argued in the lawsuit that despite discussing the email issue with Google for months, “it remains unresolved, alleging Google is sending emails to spam on purpose due to political bias”.
To address the RNC’s concerns, Google rolled out a pilot program in September last year to help prevent political emails from getting marked as spam.
However, the issue persisted.
“This discrimination has been ongoing for about 10 months — despite the RNC’s best efforts to work with Google,” the lawsuit read.
“Throughout 2022, the RNC has engaged with Google month after month to obtain an explanation and a solution. But every explanation has been refuted and every solution has failed,” it added.
A Google spokesperson said that “we simply don’t filter emails based on political affiliation. Gmail’s spam filters reflect users’ actions”.
The Republicans previously introduced a bill that would require platforms to share how their filtering techniques work and make it illegal to put campaign emails into spam unless a user asks.
“The timing of Google’s most egregious filtering is particularly damning,” the RNC said.
