North Raleigh Today

A new study from North Carolina State University found that Google may be guilty of flagging Republican emails on Google's free email service Gmail, in violation of the First Amendment. 

The new report from NCSU found that Google's free email service Gmail was substantially more likely to mark Republican fundraising emails as spam during the most vital weeks of the 2020 campaign, while Yahoo and Outlook disproportionately flagged Democratic ones, according to Axios. 

“Email is an everyday essential that millions of Americans use to communicate with one another," said Congressional candidate Blake Harbin in a press release. "We use it more than phones. Whether the conversations are about politics, policy or sports every American is guaranteed the right of free speech under our constitution. If the Palo Alto mafia is purposefully blocking the free speech of Americans, then we need to know about it and fight against it.”

The university team conducted their extensive study during the 2020 US election over a period of 5 months from July 1, 2020, to Nov. 30, 2020, using Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. Utilizing 102 email accounts and subscriptions to 2 Presidential, 78 Senate, and 156 House candidates, the team was able to accurately estimate the political biases and mitigate any potential effects of demographics by creating multiple email accounts with different combinations of demographic factors and designing two experiments, according to the report. 

"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, according to Axios.

The first experiment was designed to study the general trends of biases in spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) across the email services for the Presidential, Senate and House candidates. The second experiment studied the impact of different email interactions such as reading the emails, marking them as spam, or vice versa on the biases in SFAs, according to the report. 

Following the release of the study, US Congress candidate Blake Harbin called on Congress to immediately investigate Google for censoring the free speech of Americans under his belief that preventing free speech by big technology firms and email service providers is wrong and destructive to the democracy of the American people.