The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds.
First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better controversy. We wrote about this a couple months ago. Researchers at North Carolina State University released a preprint of a study about email spam filtering during the 2020 election. They set up a variety of email accounts, and signed up for political mailings. The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam, but found the opposite was true of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which flagged more Democratic politicians’ emails as spam than Republicans.
Of course, Democrats didn’t freak out about this. Only Republicans did, egged on by a disingenuous political trickster, who tried to make this into a big deal, and was aided by Fox News and other disingenuous entities, who turned it into a thing — even to the point of some Republicans filing a laughable complaint with the Federal Election Committee trying to argue that Google was giving an unfair advantageto Democrats.
The authors of the original study, for what it’s worth, appear to be horrified about how their study is being abused by political hacks.
“Gmail isn’t biased like the way it’s being portrayed,” [study author Muhammad Shahzad] said. “I’m not advocating for Gmail or anything. I’m just stating that when we take the observation out of a study, you should take all of the observations, not just cherry-pick a few and then try to use them.”
The bill would also create a privacy nightmare, in that it requires email providers to release transparency reports detailing how many political campaign emails were flagged as spam. But that would require the email services snoop on your emails. The transparency report would also require the email providers to designate how many Democratic campaign emails were filtered as spam, and how many Republican campaign emails were filtered as spam. So, apparently third parties are shit out of luck.
Even worse, the bill would require any email provider to respond to frequent demands from political campaigns about how often their emails were flagged as spam.