Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to approve a pilot program designed to keep verified campaign-related emails from falling into spam folders.
Under the program, emails from “authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC” would go to users for the first time as a prominent notification, according to a June 21 filing with the FEC obtained by Axios.
MOTHER LODE: NEW JERSEY HOUSE CANDIDATE’S WAR CHEST PADDED BY MOTHER’S $2M CHECK
“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,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “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.
After receiving the first notification, users will be able to select if they want to keep receiving the political emails or opt out.
The proposed program comes after a recent study by North Carolina State University found that Gmail was 50% more likely to mark an email coming from a Republican campaign as spam than a Democratic one during the 2020 election. The study assessed more than 318,000 emails sent between May 2020 and November 2020 to more than 100 Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo newly created accounts.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Republican lawmakers introduced legislation earlier this month targeting what they call “biased algorithms” from tech companies, such as Google, that “alter the way users are able to see emails from political campaigns.” The Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act would require companies to share how their filtering algorithms work.
