FEC Approves Gmail Filtering Pilot Program for Campaign Messages

UPDATE: The Federal Election Commission this week approved in a 4-1 vote Google’s request for a pilot program that will allow candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership PACs to bypass users’ spam folders and make sure their emails land in people’s inboxes.

The Federal Election Campaign Act and the FEC bans corporations from making contributions to federal candidates, political party organizations, and political committees, but because Gmail is free and pilot participants won’t be charged, “the modifications of spam filtering services for the Pilot Participants would thus appear to be in keeping with Google’s ordinary business practices,” the FEC says(Opens in a new window). “Google would be doing so for commercial, as opposed to political, reasons.”

The no vote came from Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democrat, who opposed(Opens in a new window) the proposal on the grounds that it would constitute a prohibited corporate in-kind contribution.

Committees and PACs that want to participate, meanwhile, can reach out to Google to apply; Google will also do outreach of its own. Program hopefuls will need to provide an FEC-registered email address and an FEC ID number.

Once enrolled, pilot participants will be able to send bulk emails and have all those messages land in people’s inboxes on the first send. “Whether bulk emails are classified as spam would be determined based on direct feedback from the user,” according to Google.

That first email will include “prominent notification” asking if the recipient wants to opt out of receiving emails from that sender going forward. If they opt out or unsubscribe, subsequent messages will go to spam.

Google will provide pilot participants with stats on how many of their messages are sent to spam.

The discussion about the pilot program from the FEC’s Thursday meeting can be viewed in the video below; the Google portion begins at the 5:40 mark.

Original Story 6/28:
Google is reportedly looking to appease Republican senators who claimed that Gmail disproportionately filters campaign messages sent by members of their party.

Google “has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up in spam folders,” Axios reports(Opens in a new window), by making them “exempt from spam detection as long as they don’t violate Gmail’s policies around phishing, malware, or illegal content.”

Google confirmed that it’s taking action on campaign emails in a statement to PCMag:

“We want Gmail to provide a great experience for all of our users, including minimizing unwanted email, but we do not filter emails based on political affiliation. We recently asked the FEC to authorize a pilot program that may help improve inboxing rates for political bulk senders and provide more transparency into email deliverability, while still letting users protect their inboxes by unsubscribing or labeling emails as spam. We look forward to exploring new ways to provide the best possible Gmail experience.”

The report arrives shortly after the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting (BIAS) Emails Act was introduced(Opens in a new window) by US Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and 26 other Republican senators on June 15.

The recursively named bill(Opens in a new window) would make it “unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account for a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to supply such a label.”

Axios reports that Google plans to placate the senators by making it so that “when users would receive an email from a campaign for the first time, they would get a ‘prominent’ notification asking if they want to keep receiving them, and would still have the ability to opt out of subsequent emails.”

The Political BIAS Emails Act would also require reports detailing how many times political campaign emails were labeled as spam, how many of those labels were applied by filtering algorithms, and what percentage of those filtered messages were sent by Republicans or Democrats.

The bill would require email providers to submit these reports once a quarter—unless a politician requests them. They may ask for a subset of this data once per week during election years, twice per month during non-election years, and “once a week in the 12 months preceding the date of a special election in which a candidate associated with the political campaign is seeking election.”

The Political BIAS Emails Act would also force email services to “provide to a political campaign, upon request, best practices on steps the political campaign should take to increase the number of emails from the political campaign that reach the intended recipient’s primary inbox.”