As Expected, FEC Easily Tosses Out GOP’s Whiny Complaint About Google Classifying Their Spam As Spam

Over the last year, we've been covering a whiny, victim-playing, bit of nonsense, inspired and pushed by a firm whose main business seems to be running spam email campaigns for Republican politicians, that Google is unfairly" putting their campaign emails into the spam folder. This was all kicked off when some of these Republican spammer consultants noticed that they weren't raising as much money from email blasts leading up to the 2022 midterms. Then, they misread a study from some computer scientists, saying that Gmail put a higher percentage of GOP campaign emails into spam than Democrats. They ignored that the opposite was true for other popular email systems (Outlook and Yahoo put more Dem emails into spam) and that the impact went away as soon as a user did minimal training" on what they wanted in their inbox.

Even worse, they ignored that their own email hygiene practices were so dismal, that even some of the biggest partisan GOP supporters were yelling about the GOP's spam problem.

Basically: the GOP did a lot more spamming, didn't understand how email worked, and didn't understand why people were less interested in funding their campaigns (remember in the previous election cycle, Republicans had to refund a ton of money because their spammy, scammy emails tricked people into donating way more than they intended?).

In short, a key plank of the GOP platform last year was we're the party that wants to fill your inbox with spam." Not surprisingly, the public was almost universally against this idea.

And then, rather than being the party of personal responsibility," they played the victim and blamed Google every way they could. The first step was to file a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, claiming that Google was conducting an illegal in-kind" contribution to Democrats. We predicted at the time that this FEC complaint will go nowhere," and, ta da, it turns out we were right.

As first reported by Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica, the FEC has easily dismissed the complaint, noting that it's clear that the Gmail spam filter is there for commercial purposes (i.e., the public wants a spam filter, obviously) and not to suppress political messaging:

Here, the available information indicates that Google's spam filter is in place for commercial, rather than electoral, purposes. Even presuming that the NCSU Study is both sufficiently rigorous and well-designed to establish that the spam filter has a disparate impact on Republican and Democratic candidate emails, the fact that a service or action benefits a candidate is not dispositive of whether a contribution results, so long as the purpose for that service or action is a bona fide commercial reason rather than for the purpose of influencing a federal election. As Google has stated in its public filings, its brand is negatively affected" by reputational issues, third-party content shared on [its] platforms, . . . and product or technicalperformance failures." Spam emails, which it contends constituted nearly half of all emails sent in 2021, may contain malware, phishing attacks, and scams designed to exploit and extortusers; and Google has stated in its public blog that a big part of Gmail's draw is its built-insecurity protections" designed to subvert these threats

As we had noted in some of our other articles on this, the authors of the original study had come out to criticize those (i.e., whiny, spammy, Republicans) who misrepresented their study, and the FEC took notice of this as well.

As Google's Response states, Muhammad Shahzad, a lead author of the Study[,] has since publiclystated that those who claim the Study demonstrates political bias are mischaracterizing it."

And, with that, the complaint is dismissed.

Other nonsense efforts continue to play out. I wouldn't be surprised if Republicans in the House reintroduce a special bill that says no politician emails can ever go to spam (because, boy, does Congress ever love introducing bills that exempt Congress from what the rest of the country must face).

There's also the laughably stupid lawsuit that the Republican National Committee filed against Google on this same issue. That lawsuit is still ongoing, and Google's response to the complaint is due next week. The case is going to flop as well.

All of this, of course, is just the standard grift. If you can't actually appeal to the base, find someone to blame for your own failings. And then pretend that you're a victim and that you're suing to stand up" against the big bad bullies who are... moving your spam emails to the spam folders, where they belong.

Of course, we know this is all bad faith nonsense, because Google created a special program for politicians to get out of the spam filter anyway... and no Republicans took them up on the program.

One day, it would be nice to have politicians who are actually interested in crafting policy that is best for the American public, rather than playing stupid games. That day is not today.