Republican Party is challenging Google for its Gmail election spamming strategy

• The Republican National Committee (RNC) is planning to sue Google over spam filtering.
• Google’s spam filters mirror users’ activities, but the issue has not been rectified.
• Google’s efforts to prevent political emails from being filtered as spam have been challenged by the Republican National Committee (RNC).
• Axios reports that the group is planning to sue Google in California over their “inadequate” plans to combat automated screening.
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The RNS reports that email delivery was normal for the majority of the month, but that numerous messages were diverted to spam folders at the conclusion of the month. They note that “the RNC’s fundraising has been most effective in the past at the conclusion of the month.”

After hearing complaints that more Democratic-leaning content was being marked as spam than Republican-leaning content, Google launched a pilot programme in September 2022 requiring users to initially mark political campaign emails as spam in order to ensure that more Democratic-leaning emails reached users’ inboxes. As a result, the functionality would provide a more noticeable ‘unsubscribe’ button through which users may cancel their subscriptions.

Google informed Axios that “Gmail’s spam filters mirror users’ activities,” but the RNC claims that after nine months of conversations, the issue has not been rectified.

The article did highlight, however, that the RNC has not joined up for Gmail’s spam filtering pilot programme, which is meant to prevent precisely these kinds of mistakes.

In August, the Federal Election Commission approved a request from the email provider to allow political campaign communications to go unfiltered for spam. After the function went live, qualified committees may sign up to take part in it, provided they met the criteria Google had established.

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