Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Warned gmailThe world’s largest email service, this week that it can withstand a federal investigation It is alleged that the company Intentionally suppresses the messages sent by the Republican.
“My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filter regularly conveys the message from reaching consumers when they come from the Republican sectors but fail to block the same messages sent by the Democrats,” Ferguson It is written in a letter On Thursday from Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google original company alphabet.
Ferguson warned in the letter that the discrepancies in Gmail’s spam filtering based on politics may lead to an FTC investigation and possible enforcement action. “
“A consumer’s right to listen to candidates or parties, including solicitation for donation, is no less, as the political priorities of the consumer may run counter for your company or your employees’ political preferences,” Appointed by Trump FTC Chair wrote.
“If Gmail’s filters prevent Americans from receiving speech, they expect, or when they see fit, the filters can damage American consumers and violate the prohibition of inappropriate or misleading business practices of the FTC Act.”
Republican Has complained for a long time Gmail’s spam filter removes the gop email at a higher rate from the inbox of users. The company has repeatedly refused to implement the filter improperly.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement on Friday, “Gmail’s spam filters look at a variety of purpose signals – as people mark a particular email as spam, or if a particular advertising agency is sending a high amount of email that is often marked by people,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement on Friday. “This applies equally to all sectors regardless of political ideology.”
The company said, “We will review this letter and are ready to confuse creatively.”
A federal judge A suit dismissed In 2023 that the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed against Google, by marking the Republican email as spam, accused of trying to “press the political speech and income of a major political party secretly”.
US District Judge Daniel J. Cailabretta said that it decides that other factors may contribute to the filtering of RNC email, given that “RNC sends significant number of emails to individuals in its list.”
“While some, perhaps many, the users wanted especially each of those emails, Google may appropriately assume these emails as a large -scale mailing, as for other email sectors,” Kailabretta wrote. “In this case, RNC alleges that Google worked in ‘Bad Faith’, does not rise above the speculative level.”
Federal Election Commission (FEC) Dismissed A complaint by RNC about Gmail that year alleged that the company effectively made Democrats a spam folders to the spam folders and effectively made Democrats “contribution to illegal corporate in-one-face”.
FEC wrote, “Google has reliably supported its claim that its spam filter is for commercial reasons and is not a contribution.”
