https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/gmail_is_hiding_emails_from_conservatives.html
It’s not uncommon for the American Thinker staff to learn that emails from readers and writers have vanished into Gmail’s automatic spam filter. It’s extremely irritating but is it deliberate? One study suggests that it probably is. That’s either because the email’s content is obviously conservative or because the email comes from Proton Mail, a site to which conservatives gravitated after the FBI’s partisan crackdown following January 6.
Six years ago, Russ Vaughn authored an American Thinker post revealing that his email box appeared to show a distinct bias in the way Google automatically sorted email:
I decided to clean out my email trash, and after completing the task, I turned to my spam to do the same. But upon clicking into that folder, I made the interesting discovery that almost all of the emails relegated to spam by Gmail’s filters (I have no personal filters in place) had a common thread: Almost all were from conservative sources. In fact, ninety percent of them were from Republican or conservative causes, most seeking contributions.
It turns out that what Russ observed was not limited to his own inbox. North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science decided to look into the matter. Fox News reports that it recently published its findings in “A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020.” The results completely supported Russ’s suspicions:
“We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam,” the proposed methodology section continued. “Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam).”