Political Spam Coming to Gmail

Google is to test a plan to exempt political campaign messages from its spam filter. It says users will have a clear opportunity to opt out.

The move has proven unpopular with many people, particularly since users will need to opt out on a sender-by-sender basis. There won't be a simple way to opt out of all political emails.

Previously Google had labeled many campaign emails as spam because, well, that's what they often are. In many, if not most, cases people were receiving messages despite not explicitly giving permission for their address to be used in that way. The spam filter appeared to be a non-controversial way to deal with the unwanted messages as users could still find and read messages in their spam folder if they chose.

Bias Claims

Google is thought to have made the change to avoid a political row following a North Caroline State University study that suggested messages from Republican candidates were more likely to be sent into spam folders than those from Democrats. (Source: axios.com)

Google denied any bias and said the biggest reason for any disparity would simple be that users were more likely to have marked previous messages from specific senders as spam.

Rather than continue making that argument, Google decided to simply exempt messages from registered political candidates from its spam filter, as long as they meet security requirements. It ran the plan past the Federal Election Commission, which was satisfied it was a politically neutral approach.

One-Click Blocks Future Messages

Under the new system, the first message from a registered campaigns will include a prominent notification asking users if they want to carry on getting messages from the sender. If the user clicks on the "no" button, all future messages from that sender will go straight to the spam folder.

After that, marking any message from a particular sender as being spam will work as normal, while there will be a Google-inserted unsubscribe button. (Source: androidpolice.com)

Google will initially test the program between now and January on a limited number of emails before opening all registered campaign messages up to the "not spam by default" rule. That's very unfortunate timing as it raises the possibility that different parties or different campaigns will be affected by the test in different ways during the midterm campaigning season.

Even if the different effects are purely down to chance, it could create exactly the same impressions of bias that led to Google making the changes.

What's Your Opinion?

Is Google right to make this change? Do you believe it was biased in how it marked campaign mails as spam? Should it have an option to send all campaign messages to the spam folder?