Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Yet another example of Big Tech trying to manipulate US politics?

 

One hopes that with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, that platform at least will become more even-handed in its approach to US politics.  Sadly, the same may not be true of Google, as this report suggests.  Its authors are themselves partisan, so keep that in mind when you read it.


An alarming study released last month showed that Google’s Gmail marks Republican campaign emails as “spam” 8.5 times more often than it does Democrat campaign emails. This bias has led to potentially hundreds of millions of fundraising losses for Republican candidates.

While it’s no secret Big Tech has suppressed conservative voices for years, this egregious, partisan assault on free speech is yet another wakeup call for all Americans. If they can do it to Republican candidates running for office, they can do it to you too.

The study’s findings are shocking. In Google’s algorithm, 68 percent of emails from Republican candidates are flagged as spam versus just 8 percent for Democrats. This means only 32 percent of GOP emails are effectively delivered. Big Tech is actively giving Democratic campaigns a massive fundraising advantage over Republican campaigns.

With email a key channel for raising money and securing votes, this could have a decisive impact in deciding election outcomes.


There's more at the link.

If confirmed, this will be one of the most in-your-face examples of political bias yet.  It's become so blatant in much of Big Tech that it's obvious they no longer care about it being exposed.  They're effectively defying anybody and everybody to do something about it.

One may still hope that a future, less ideologically extreme administration will do precisely that - even though such reports suggest that installing such an administration is increasingly unlikely.



Peter


2 comments:

Aesop said...

They do it because they mistakenly think they have a successful monopoly, rather than realizing they're squeezing jello in their hands.

Ask CNN+ and Netflix how that's working out in practice.

Jeff McPhate said...

I made the mistake of making some donations to Republicans in the last election and they continually blow up my inbox with solicitations. I tried unsubscribing, but that is useless. It is all spam, as far as I'm concerned.