With less than three weeks to go until the US midterm congressional elections, the Republican party is outraged that its emails will mostly end up in recipients’ spam folders. The Republican National Committee (RNC) has therefore filed a lawsuit against Google.
The party board has accused the tech giant of discrimination because it “throttles emails because of the political connection and view of the RNC,” according to the lawsuit filed in the state of California. But, according to the RNC, things went well for an important part of the month. Emails just landed in people’s inboxes.
But at the end of the month, an important time for raising money, the party claims that almost all messages ended up in the spam box. “It is critical and suspicious that this end of the month is historically the time when the RNC’s fundraising efforts have been most successful.”
According to the RNC, the ‘discrimination’ has been going on for ten months, despite frantic efforts to do something about it with Google. Republicans have long accused major tech companies of discriminating against conservative opinions and curtailing free speech.
Google denies the allegations. “As we’ve said repeatedly, we simply don’t filter emails based on political affiliation. Gmail spam filters reflect user actions.” The company says it provides training and manuals for campaigns and is working on getting emails to the right place as much as possible and minimizing the amount of unwanted spam.’
