January 1, Study: Google Favors Left-Wing Candidates

A new study from North Carolina State University finds that Google’s Gmail favors left-wing candidates over conservative candidates.

The university’s study examined a potential bias within spam filtering algorithms (SFAs). Between July 1 and November 30, 2020, the researchers created 102 email accounts and subscribed to two presidential, 78 Senate, and 156 House candidates on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

“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 researchers wrote.

“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).”

The study “further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same” in the days preceding the 2020 presidential election.

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Google’s Gmail favors left-wing candidates, sends far more emails from conservatives to spam: study