Public Pans Google Proposal To Allow Political Emails To Skirt Spam Filters

Google has asked the Federal Election Commission for its blessing on a plan to exempt political campaign emails from Gmail’s spam filters, and — based on public comments on the plan — many of its users are not happy about the prospect.In a letter to the commission earlier this month, Google asked for its approval for a pilot program ahead of the 2022 midterm election that would allow federally registered candidates and political action committees to bypass Gmail’s spam filters and send emails directly to users’ inboxes. Participants in the pilot would be required to include links in every email allowing users to unsubscribe to the emails with one click.Google said in the request that every minute its spam filters block nearly 10 million spam emails from reaching its 1.5 billion Gmail users’ inboxes.The FEC initially gave the public through July 11 to comment on Google’s proposal, but later extended the deadline to August 5. As of Friday, the commission had posted 466 comments on the topic — almost all of them against the plan. A Democratic member of the commission, Ellen Weintraub, said there has been “unusual public interest in this request; we should hear as much feedback as we can.”The public feedback received so far by the commission is pretty universal: Allowing political email to evade spam filters is a horrible idea. A really horrible idea. Of the hundreds of comments received so far, only one supported the proposal.“Hard pass, hell no, absolutely not to allowing political e-mail to pass Google’s spam filters,” a commenter named Seth J wrote. “Allowing this measure could unleash not only a glut of unwanted, dubiously vetted, e-mails but also serve as an avenue for potential security risks.”“I strongly object to political emails from any party getting special exemption from spam filters, and urge you to deny Google’s request to do so,” Stephen Remington wrote. “I made several donations to Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, and immediately started getting emails from all over the country, from candidates whom I had never heard of.”The executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, Michelle Kuppersmith, wrote, “Given that four Attorneys General are investigating fraudulent and misleading political fundraising practices, now is not the time for the FEC to make it easier for political fundraisers to evade spam protections and send unwanted e-mails to every Gmail user. The public finds political fundraising e-mails overwhelming, annoying, and inescapable, and the FEC shouldn’t be doing anything to make it easier for unscrupulous fundraisers to send people unwanted e-mails.”Many of the comments were not quite as civil, laced with expletives and capital letters expressing near-universal revulsion to the prospect of getting more political emails in inboxes.Google’s proposal comes after Republicans in Congress and at one of its primary digital marketing arms, Targeted Victory, have been complaining since 2020 that their emails were being censored by Gmail and other email providers. During a hearing on Capitol Hill that year, a Florida Republican congressman, Greg Steube, complained to the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, that his parents, who use Gmail, were not receiving his campaign emails. A study released in March by researchers at North Carolina State University which suggested that Gmail’s spam filters appeared to discriminate against right-leaning candidates during the 2020 election cycle further fueled the debate. The researchers studied the spam algorithms of Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Outlook and found that Yahoo steered about half of all political emails to its inboxes while Outlook marked nearly 72 percent of all emails from political candidates as spam. Gmail’s filters, however, directed nearly 90 percent of left-wing candidates’ emails to the inbox while sending 77 percent of right-wing candidates’ emails to spam folders. “We further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same,” the researchers reported. Publicity about the study prompted Senator Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, to propose the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act, which would prohibit platforms like Google from filtering political emails unless a user took proactive action to apply the spam label to email from a particular sender. A companion bill was introduced in the House.“Consumers should have the most power to determine what they do or don’t see online, especially when they have opted to receive emails in the first place,” Mr. Thune said. “Nothing in the Political BIAS Emails Act would stop a user from marking an email they don’t want as spam — but it would prevent large platforms from trying to make those decisions for the user.”

Public Pans Google Proposal To Allow Political Emails To Skirt Spam Filters

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