As today's political candidates will use very possible means of communication in order to reach voters, complaints were raised against Gmail's spam filtering.
To address the complaints, Google is planning to keep political "campaign emails from ending up in spam folders," according to a report by 9to5Google.
The tech company has sought the permission of the Federal Election Commission to give a go signal to a program that could "keep campaign emails from ending up in spam folders," according to Axios.
How Would Gmail Spam Exemption Work?
As per 9to5Google report, Gmail spam exemption would be for "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC."
As long as they don't violate Gmail's policies around phishing, malware or illegal content, campaign emails from such groups will be exempted from spam detection.
However, as a protocol, Google will get a prominent notification, the first time they receive an email, if they want to keep hearing from that particular campaign.
Users still have the ability to opt-out. Moreover, users can still mark emails as spam, but Google won't do it by default anymore, as per 9to5Google.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda said: "We want Gmail to provide a great experience for all of our users, including minimizing unwanted email, but we do not filter emails based on political affiliation."
Furthermore, Castañeda said that Google has recently asked the FEC to authorize a pilot program to help improve inboxing rates for political bulk senders. The pilot program will also provide more transparency into email deliverability.
However, with the new pilot program users can still protect their inboxes by unsubscribing or labeling emails as spam.
Meanwhile, sources told Axios that last week that Google CEO Sundar Pichai visited Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers.
According to Axios, "topic under discussions included the Republican email filtering bill, a tech antitrust bill making its way to the full Senate floor, USICA and privacy legislation."
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Criticism Against Google's Political Partisanship
In May, Google has been criticized that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services. The company has been under fire as allegedly the Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam.
"Gmail is actively suppressing emails from Republicans from hitting your inbox," tweeted the U.S. Congressman Ronny Jackson in May. "Straight to SPAM! This is ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Big Tech is out of CONTROL!!"
But the accusation of the congressman was immediately debunked by Google.
"Political affiliation has absolutely no bearing on mail classifications in Gmail and we've debunked this suggestion, which has surfaced periodically from across the political spectrum, for many years," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Mashable.
Furthermore, Google added that mail classifications in Gmail automatically adjust to match Gmail users' preferences and actions. With this, Gmail users can move messages to spam, or to any other category.
"Gmail automatically adjusts the classifications of particular emails according to these user actions," said the Google spokesperson.
This month, Republican leadership introduced a bill that would require platforms to share how their filtering techniques work. The bill also stipulates that it is illegal to put campaign emails into spam unless a user asks, according to Axios.
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