Court dismisses GOP legal action against Google over Gmail spam blockers

According to The Washington Post, a federal judge has dismissed the lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) against Google last year. The RNC had accused Google of political bias in relation to its Gmail spam filters. The judge stated that Google was protected by Section 230 of US law and that the RNC had not provided enough evidence to prove that Google acted in bad faith by filtering out campaign emails.

According to the lawsuit, Google intentionally marked “millions” of RNC emails as spam, so the group is seeking compensation for “donations it allegedly lost as a result.” As evidence, it cited a study that found Gmail was more likely than Yahoo and other mail systems to flag Republican emails as spam. (One of the authors of the study told Posti last year that its results were cherry-picked.)

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta called the lawsuit a “closed case” and said the RNC “failed to make a credible claim” that Google’s spam filtering was done in good faith. Google said the emails in question were likely marked as spam due to user complaints, citing RNC domain authentication issues and frequent mail as other potential problems.

The court also ruled that the RNC emails could be considered “matchable” under the CAN-SPAM Act, and that Google’s labeling them as such fell within Section 230, which protects online platforms from third-party civil liability. contents. Still, the judge said, Republicans could still make the case better about Google’s lack of good faith.

Interestingly, during the US midterm elections last year, Google created a loophole that allowed political campaigns to bypass Gmail’s spam filters. However, the RNC reportedly did not take advantage of the program. Google has since ended the experiment after largely negative feedback from the public.