Google sends Republican fundraising emails to spam, says GOP chairwoman
GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel Saturday accused Google of deliberately sending Republican National Committee (RNC) fundraising emails to spam.
In a series of tweets, McDaniel shared that this has been a practice of Google’s for the last eight consecutive months. The RNC’s emails throughout the month typically have a 90%-100% inbox delivery rate but drop down to 0% at the end of the month when the fundraising emails are sent out.
“These are emails that go to our most engaged, opt-in supporters without any increase in user complaints, changes to the content, email frequency or target audiences that could account for the suppression,” said McDaniel.
“Yet month after month – like clockwork – right ahead of a CRITICAL period when voters are most engaged, Google blocks our emails. They even block GOTV emails,” McDaniel added, referring to “Get Out the Vote” voter registration drives.
The RNC has reportedly filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, but the issue continues to occur.
Google has grown less furtive in recent months about its suppression of dissenting political voices.
In February, the tech behemoth sent civil liberties organization America’s Frontline Doctors a message that it would be downranking AFLDS.org in Google’s search results because of the medical opinions expressed by the group of physicians.
“Your site appears to violate our medical content policy and contains content primarily aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment for commercial purposes,” read the notification. “Nor do we allow content from any site that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence based best practices. Learn more."
Google made no pretenses about their expectations from AFLDS. They offer only one option for responding to the alert: To delete content from the AFLDS website and then click the “Request Review” button which is prefaced with the question, “Done fixing?”
Until AFLDS “submits” to Google’s self-censorship demands, the search giant plans to continue censoring the AFLDS site by reducing display features, lowering its ranking or even removing it from Google Search results.
Google fails, in its alert, to define content “that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence based best practices.”
America's Frontline News previously reported how longstanding rumors of Google’s political bias led to their CEO’s public denial of the charges in September 2018. As CNN reported, “Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to reports that some staff had discussed tweaking search results to show a pro-immigration bias. ‘We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,' he wrote in an email to Google employees.”
The Daily Caller reported in April 2019, though, that, “Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.”
In August 2019, Project Veritas followed up with its own story on Google’s secret censorship of conservative content in an article entitled, “Google ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ Whistleblower Goes Public".
In the article, whistleblower Zachary Vorhies described how “Google allegedly called the police to perform a ‘wellness check’ on him" after suspecting his involvement in the release of “hundreds of internal Google documents," including “a file called ‘news black list site for google now’. The document, according to Vorhies, is a ‘black list,’ which restricts certain websites from appearing on news feeds for an Android Google product.”
An entire folder of the leaked documents fall under the heading, “censorship” and a document entitled “Fringe ranking/classifer: Defining channel quality” actually includes the following screenshot showing its “example ranking of various news sites,” with obvious implications for their ranking in search results.
