le sued the RNC // (John Hinderaker).
Your email list is often called your “owned audience” by people in the industry. But it turns out that you may not actually own it. The major email system companies tend to be on left. My organization left MailChimp because of apparent political bias. This prevented us from sending emails to our thousands of subscribers without restriction.
The Republican National Committee is now suing Google, alleging Gmail discriminates against Republicans during a critical fundraising season.
The Republican National Committee is suing Google over allegedly biased diversion emails to spam folders. It claims it has the receipts to support its claim.
The suit, filed in California federal court on Friday, alleges that email analytics programs of the party have documented a 10-month pattern where email suppression occurred toward the end each month, “historically when RNC’s fundraising success is greatest”. ***
The RNC claimed that GOP emails to Gmail users who opted in for them have reached their inboxes at a rate up to 90% on most days of the month since December.However, almost all of the party’s email were marked as spam for at least two days towards the end of each calendar month. This sent them to an inbox that few users check.
Google denies any bias in their email algorithm. There is another:
North Carolina State University researchers looked at email patterns before the 2020 presidential election and found that Google’s Gmail algorithm labelled GOP fundraising e mails as spam at an 8200% higher rate than Democratic Party messages. This led to a formal complaint by the Republican Party to the Federal Election Commission.
Although I don’t know if the RNC’s complaint was well-founded, I wouldn’t be surprised, considering everything we’ve learned about Big Tech, to believe it. I can tell you that the companies that manage email traffic are an important but often overlooked sector of Big Tech.