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“The RNC alleges financial losses, blaming bias against conservatives as the cause.”
Last year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) initiated legal action against Google, alleging that the company’s Gmail spam filters displayed political bias. However, a federal judge has recently dismissed the lawsuit, citing Google’s protection under Section 230 of US law. The RNC failed to provide sufficient evidence that Google deliberately acted in bad faith by filtering out campaign emails, as reported by The Washington Post.
The RNC claimed that Google intentionally marked millions of their emails as spam, resulting in potential financial losses. To support their argument, they referenced a study that found Gmail to be more likely than other mail systems to classify Republican emails as spam. However, the authors of the study later clarified that the RNC had selectively used their findings to substantiate their claims.
US District Court judge Daniel Calabretta described the lawsuit as a “close case” and determined that the RNC did not adequately support their allegations of bad faith on Google’s part. Google countered by suggesting that user complaints, RNC domain authentication issues, and frequent mailouts might have triggered the spam classification.
The court further ruled that RNC emails could be considered “objectionable” under the CAN-SPAM Act, and Section 230 provided immunity to Google for flagging them as such. Nevertheless, the judge left open the possibility for Republicans to amend their lawsuit and provide stronger evidence of Google’s lack of good faith.
Interestingly, during the US mid-term elections last year, Google introduced a workaround that allowed political campaigns to bypass Gmail spam filters. However, the RNC reportedly did not take advantage of this program. Google has since discontinued the experiment due to predominantly negative feedback from the public.