Earlier this month, Google sent a letter to the FEC requesting an advisory opinion on the said plan. The company wants to launch a pilot program that would stop Gmail algorithms from sending campaign emails from some FEC-registered political committees to the spam folder. The Commission sought public opinion on the matter and received an overwhelming response. It is now extending the deadline so more Americans can share what they feel about Google’s plan. This AO (advisory opinion) request from Google is seeing “unusual public interest,” said Weintraub. “We should hear as much feedback as we can.” As said earlier, all comments are made public and you can read them here. We just went through over 200 comments and, unsurprisingly, didn’t find a single American speaking in support of Google. Everyone wants the FEC to deny permission to the tech behemoth for launching the pilot program. No one wants a political email in their inbox. “Unsolicited email is spam, regardless of the source. No email should be treated differently just because the sender is registered as a political committee,” said one respondent. “Absolutely not. This is a terrible idea that would open the floodgates to even more spammy and abusive political advertisements. No,” added another.
Google wants to ease tensions with political parties
Google wants to “un-spam” all political emails in Gmail to ease tensions with political parties. Earlier this year, Republicans complained that the company is sending their emails to the spam folder at a higher rate than emails from Democrats. Google, expectedly, denied the allegations and stated that its algorithms aren’t biased and do not filter emails based on political affiliation. However, Republicans last month introduced a bill that would require email service providers such as Gmail to share information on their spam filtering algorithms. They want to make it illegal for companies to send political campaign emails to the spam folder with users manually marking them as spam. Google is now pretty much acting on this bill to ease tensions with political parties. But with zero public support, it’ll be interesting to see what the FEC decides. We will keep you posted on the matter.
