The Republican National Committee (RNC) has filed a lawsuit against Google in a U.S. District Court in California, accusing it of putting campaign emails into the spam folders of its millions of users. Google last month launched a pilot program to prevent campaign emails from being put into spam. But the RNC has been critical of the program, arguing that it doesn’t do enough to help filter political emails.
Google launched the program in June. It was later approved by the Federal Election Commission and launched last month.
The lawsuit alleges that Google “collectively relegated millions of RNC emails to the spam folders of potential donors and supporters at a critical time of election fundraising and community building.”
“The timing of Google’s most egregious filtering is particularly egregious,” the RNC asserted.” For most of each month, nearly all RNC emails make their way to users’ inboxes. At about the same time at the end of each month, Google sends almost all of the RNC’s emails to spam. Crucially, and suspiciously, this end-of-month period is historically the most successful time for fundraising for the RNC.”
The other side said, “As we’ve said repeatedly, we don’t filter emails based on political affiliation at all,” said Google spokesman Jose Castañeda.” Gmail’s spam filter reflects user behavior. We provide training and guidance to campaigns, we recently launched a Federal Election Commission-approved pilot for politically relevant senders, and we will continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam.”
The lawsuit, filed just in time for the U.S. midterm election season, is part of a larger effort by Republicans to target technology companies for what they see as a false bias against their party online.
Last year, former President Donald Trump announced class-action lawsuits against companies like Facebook and Twitter.
