Republican National Committee sues Google, alleging email suppression

The Republican National Committee has sued Google, alleging that the tech behemoth is purposefully filtering RNC emails to subscribers’ spam folders “because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views.”

The lawsuit was filed Friday in Sacramento in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. The Eastern District is, per the lawsuit, where half of the RNC’s California offices and a third of its community centers are located.

Email campaigns related specifically to the 2022 midterm elections have had uncharacteristically low “inboxing” rates (or, the number of emails landing in a subscriber’s inbox rather than its spam folder) since February, the RNC said, which has caused the organization “to lose valuable revenue in California and the rest of the country.”

The RNC claims that despite its investment in an emailing marketing platform meant to maximize readership and engagement, it noticed in February that the inboxing rate dropped from “consistently above 90% to nearly 0%. The drop has continued “on certain days during the last week of each month,” the party alleges.

“This inboxing rate of nearly 0% means that Gmail hid nearly every campaign email sent by the RNC from the Gmail users on whom the RNC financially relies,” the lawsuit claims.

“The only reasonable inference is that Google is intentionally sending critical RNC emails to the spam folder because it’s the RNC sending them.”

Other email platforms like Yahoo and Microsoft Outlook have apparently not filtered RNC messages to spam to the extent that Gmail has. The lawsuit cites a North Carolina State University study that supposedly found that Google’s algorithm drove ideological bias against conservative candidates and organizations. (The study’s authors, however, have said the GOP is misrepresenting the findings.)

Google denies any allegations of bias.

“As we have repeatedly said, we simply don’t filter emails based on political affiliation,” said José Castañeda, Google spokesperson via email.

“Gmail’s spam filters reflect users’ actions. We provide training and guidelines to campaigns, we recently launched an FEC-approved pilot for political senders, and we continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam.”

In an effort to dispel any allegations of political bias, Google announced it would pilot a program wherein candidates, political party committees, and leadership political action committees can apply for spam folder exemptions.

It was a controversial move that the Federal Election Committee narrowly approved in August. But the RNC, which met with Google about the issue of email suppression several times over the course of 2022, has reportedly not joined or even applied for the program.

This story was originally published October 24, 2022 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Republican National Committee sues Google, alleging email suppression."