Google Faced with RNC Lawsuit for Sending Campaign Emails to Spam

In a lawsuit filed Friday in a federal court in California, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is accusing the US tech giant Google of deliberately sending its campaign emails to spam folders.

RNC believes that Google was throttling its email messages because of the committee’s political affiliation and views, making the case about a market-dominant communications firm unlawfully discriminating against the RNC.

As the Republic National Committee’s suit reads, not only that Google has been sending its campaign and fundraising emails to spam for 10 months, but it also ignored RNC’s requests to discuss the issue.

The media company, as RNC notes, was previously working with them to resolve problems regarding the spam filter.

Emphasizing the particularly damning timing of, as they call it, Google’s most egregious filtering, the RNC alleges that nearly all its campaign emails were filtered to spam by Google at the most profitable time of fundraising for the RNC, the end of the month.

As RNC’s legal team explains, every explanation has been refuted and every solution has failed during the discussions with Google, stressing that the only reasonable explanation is that the media giant is intentionally sending critical emails to the spam because it’s the RNC sending them.

Back in August, as CNN reported, Google was allowed by the federal election regulators to implement its pilot program to make it easier for political campaign emails to bypass its algorithms for sorting emails into spam by changing spam filters.

Google came up with the idea of the pilot program following intense criticism from the Republican Party that Google’s spam filters were biased against conservatives which Google vehemently denied.

The Federal Election Commission received afterward thousands of public comments urging it to deny the request, expressing disgust with the spam, but the commission ruled that Google’s project did not violate federal campaign finance laws and did not constitute an improper in-kind political contribution.