FTC chair warns Google about Gmail’s ‘partisan’ spam filters

Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Commerce Fee, lately expressed concern that “Alphabet’s administration of Gmail is designed to have partisan results.”

In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Ferguson pointed to a current story within the New York Publish describing complaints by Focused Victory (a consulting and PR agency that’s labored with the Republican Nationwide Committee and Elon Musk’s X) claiming that Gmail flags emails linking to the Republican fundraising platform WinRed as spam, with out doing the identical to emails linking to the Democratic platform ActBlue.

“My understanding from current reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching shoppers when these messages come from Republican senders however fail to dam related messages despatched by Democrats,” Ferguson wrote.

He warned Alphabet that if Gmail’s filters “hold Individuals from receiving speech they anticipate, or donating as they see match, the filters might hurt American shoppers and should violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or misleading commerce practices,” including this might result in “an FTC investigation and potential enforcement motion.”

In response, a Google spokesperson informed Axios that Gmail’s spam filters “have a look at quite a lot of goal alerts – like whether or not individuals mark a selected e mail as spam, or if a selected advert company is sending a excessive quantity of emails which might be usually marked by individuals as spam,” and so they stated the corporate applies this method “equally to all senders, no matter political ideology.”

The spokesperson additionally stated, “We’ll evaluation this letter and look ahead to participating constructively.”

Conservatives regularly complain that they’re being censored or in any other case handled unfairly by digital platforms, together with Gmail. In 2023, the Federal Election Fee dismissed a grievance from Republicans over Gmail’s spam filters, and a federal court docket additionally dismissed an RNC lawsuit with related complaints. (The RNC appears to be reviving that lawsuit.)

Earlier this month, a federal decide blocked the FTC’s investigation into the left-leaning group Media Issues over its analysis into antisemitic content material on X, describing the investigation as “a retaliatory act.”