The bill from Thune, R-S.D., is a reaction to a study from North Carolina State University that discovered Gmail sends a much higher percentage of Republican candidates’ emails to spam than Democrats. It has the backing of the whole GOP leadership team, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and 19 different Republican senators.
Called the Political BIAS Emails Act, the bill would ban email services from applying filtering algorithms to messages from federal political campaigns. Email services like Google would be forced to give campaign information straight upon request and produce quarterly reports on GOP and Democrat emails going to spam.
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“Almost 70% of [Republican] political communication was sent to spam,” Thune announced in an interview with Fox News Digital, referring to the North Carolina State study’s analysis of Gmail’s practices. “They did a similar analysis of Democratic emails and found that only 8% had been sent to spam. So clearly there was some algorithm that was being used that was manipulating what people were… seeing.”
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Google denies that it filters emails in a way meant to harm or hurt any specific party.
“We do not filter emails based on political affiliation, and we’re working on increasing transparency data for bulk senders, including campaigns, in our suite of tools for senders,” a Google spokesperson said to Fox News. “We look forward to working with lawmakers and campaigns to ensure Gmail is providing users with the best experience.”
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Thune, who’s worked on tech legislation in different areas before, announced Senate Republicans invited Google representatives to a meeting with their caucus members to discuss the North Carolina State conclusions. Though that conversation didn’t go well, he stated.
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“We asked people to come in and defend it, and they said, well, you know, that doesn’t comport with our data or whatever. But they didn’t really offer an alternative,” the Senate minority whip stated.
“What happened was our members got more and more agitated as they talked about this,” Thune went on, “because they didn’t have a good explanation for why a consumer shouldn’t have the option of deciding whether or not, you know, a company sends information based on a filtering algorithm to spam.”
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The different GOP leadership team members supporting the bill are Senate GOP Conference Chair John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott, R-Fla.; GOP Policy Committee Chair Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; and GOP Conference Vice-Chair Joni Ernst. R-Iowa.
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