Email is a powerful weapon in campaigns. Along with texting, it is a good fundraising tool in a world where elections cost to much and fundraising is important.
On Thursday, a website called Amuse posted an article explaining how Big Tech can quietly tip the scales in an election.
The article reports:
In an age obsessed with equity, a certain form of discrimination thrives unchallenged: algorithmic bias against conservative speech. While the platforms most frequently scrutinized are social media giants, the more insidious, less visible battleground is email. Long relied upon by Republican candidates, conservative advocacy groups, and grassroots organizers, email has become the new frontier where Big Tech quietly tips the scales.
To many, this claim might appear paranoid. After all, isn’t a spam filter simply a neutral tool designed to protect users from Nigerian princes and unsolicited coupons? That would be comforting if it were true. But the evidence, painstakingly compiled over multiple election cycles, paints a picture that is not only credible but damning.
The most rigorous academic investigation to date comes from a team at North Carolina State University. In a peer-reviewed study analyzing over 318,000 campaign emails sent during the 2020 U.S. election, the researchers created hundreds of fresh accounts across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, subscribing equally to Republican and Democratic mailing lists. Their finding was straightforward and alarming: Gmail, the most widely used email service on earth, flagged as spam nearly 77% of emails sent by Republican campaigns. In contrast, just under 10% of Democratic emails were filtered. The disparity wasn’t marginal. It was systematic, and it worsened the closer the calendar crept to Election Day.
This sort of differential treatment might be defensible if it could be accounted for by differences in content, formatting, or compliance. It cannot. The researchers controlled for those variables. They found that the political affiliation of the sender, rather than any objective feature of the email, was the primary predictor of whether it would land in the inbox or the spam folder.
Of course, Gmail is not the only offender. Outlook displayed a reverse skew in the same 2020 study, filtering a larger percentage of left-wing emails. Yahoo, while appearing more balanced in 2020, swung hard in the opposite direction by 2024. According to a 2024 study conducted by EmailToolTester, Yahoo flagged 22.3% of Republican emails as spam compared to only 6.3% of Democratic ones. AOL, now under the same corporate umbrella as Yahoo, filtered 32.5% of Republican emails while sparing all but 10.3% of their Democratic counterparts. In practical terms, this meant that conservative organizations faced triple the barrier in reaching their audiences compared to liberal ones.
Blocking political emails is wrong regardless of which political party does it. We need someone to oversee our techies to make sure this will not happen in the future.