The Federal Election Commission rejected a complaint from the GOP that Google's Gmail app helped Democratic candidates by sending Republican fundraising emails to spam at a significantly higher rate than Democratic ones, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The Republican National Committee said the alleged advantage for Democrats constituted unreported campaign contributions to the party, but the FEC said it "found no reason to believe" that Google prohibited in-kind corporate contributions, and that any skewed results from its spam filter algorithms was inadvertent.
"Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution" within the meaning of federal campaign laws, according to an FEC analysis reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
In its complaint, the GOP cited a study by North Carolina State University showing that from 2019 to 2020 nearly 70% of emails from Republican candidates were sent to spam, compared to one in 10 Democrat candidates during the same time.
Republicans contended that Google's "overwhelmingly disproportionate suppression of GOP emails" was an illegal corporate contribution to Democratic candidates.
But the FEC disagreed, noting that the study also stated that its authors had no reason to believe that there were any deliberate attempts by the email services to create biases to influence voters.
"Though the NCSU Study appears to demonstrate a disparate impact from Google's spam filter, it explicitly states that its authors have 'no reason to believe that there were deliberate attempts from these email services to create these biases to influence the voters,'" the FEC said.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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