Swinging the Vote ? – The Markup
►https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/02/26/wheres-my-email
The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
We found that few of the emails we’d signed up to receive —11 percent—made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is “for the mail you really, really want.”
Half of all emails landed in a tab called “promotions,” which Gmail says is for “deals, offers, and other marketing emails.” Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam.
For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects.
“The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening,” said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O’Rourke’s digital campaign.
“It’s scary that if Gmail changes their algorithms,” he added, “they’d have the power to impact our election.”
Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.”
“Mail classifications automatically adjust to match users’ preferences and actions,” she said. “Users really like the tab organization.”
Gmail enables the tabs by default, but they can be disabled. Wattie declined to say whether most users keep the tabs, but an email deliverability firm said about 34 percent of respondents to a 2016 survey said they use them.
The tabs also serve another purpose: ad inventory. While Gmail does not sell ads in the primary inbox, advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free accounts.
Some fear that, as a result, Gmail has the same conflict of interest that exists on social networks: If the platforms make it too easy to reach people for free, no one will buy ads.
“The worry is that they want to basically turn Gmail into a Facebook-style news feed where you have to pay for placement in the inbox,” said Ryan Alexander, a Democratic digital consultant.
Wattie, the Google spokesperson, replied: “What you describe is not on our roadmap for Gmail.”
A coalition of eight progressive advocacy groups in the U.S. noticed a similar change at about the same time and said it suppressed donations and petition signatures. We reviewed email data provided by Democracy for America, CREDO Action and SumOfUs and found their Gmail open rates did drop that spring, by about 50 percent compared with email sent to subscribers using other email providers.
“We believe that our ability to inform and engage the public in political action, which we believe is fundamental to a healthy democracy, is being impeded,” the coalition wrote in a letter to Google in November 2018.
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