Remember the “no spin zone”?
Read this Fox News story. It makes Google sound like it is attempting to limit Republican candidates reaching voters by email because much more email from Republican candidates ends up in spam folders. The spam folder seldom receives any attention making the email less likely to be read.
Now – read the actual research study (link appears in the Fox article). The description of Gmail is accurate. What is not reported are the other results. The study covered Gmail, yahoo, and outlook. The data show the opposite results with yahoo and outlook with more email from Democratic candidates treated as spam. Fox story is factually accurate, but misrepresents what anyone who read the actual study would know. It would have been easy to report the summary of the study (see below).
[Summary. Our observations in §4.1 to answer Q1 revealed that all SFAs exhibited political biases in the months leading upto the 2020 US elections. Gmail leaned towards the left (Democrats) whereas Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right (Republicans). Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates, whereas Outlook and Yahoo marked 20.4% and 14.2% more emails from left candidates as spam compared to the right candidates, respectively.]
I thought I would check my own Gmail spam folder. I did not do a precise count, but there are plenty of emails from both parties Gmail hid as spam. Check your own spam folder if you have one. To be fair, we are not in the time leading up to a Presidential election. I also explore a lot of political stories and this may influence how the trackers have me labeled.
If you are concerned, take some time with the content of your spam folder. This could be quite informative. It is easy to inform Google that you want to see items similar to any item you think should have not been sent to the spam folder. Open an item in the folder and you should find the following message.
