Another day yields another liberal news story that protects Big Tech from allegations of election interference to benefit the left.
Just days after Politico defended leftist Google from allegations of election interference, The Washington Post attempted to whitewash the results of a university study finding considerable left-leaning bias in Gmail’s spam-filtering algorithm.
In The Post’s piece, Post tech reporter Cristiano Lima, with the assistance of Post tech policy researcher Aaron Schaffer, wrote that congressional Republicans “omitted or downplayed biases against Democrats in Outlook and Yahoo Mail.”
But it’s a bit curious how GOP politicians could downplay the study’s findings, given that it showed much lesser bias in favor of right-wing candidates by Outlook and Yahoo than it showed in favor of left-wing candidates by Gmail.
The Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) filed a joint complaint with the Federal Election Commission last month, after a March-released North Carolina State University (NC State) study detailed the bias.
Among other things, the study found Gmail marked 59.3 percent more emails from right-leaning candidates as spam compared to left-leaning candidates. The same study found that Microsoft Outlook’s email spam algorithm favored Republicans only by a margin of 20 percent and Yahoo’s algorithm by 14 percent.
It also defies logical consistency that Lima and Schaffer cited study author Muhammad Shahzad as an authoritative source while also allowing Google spokesperson Ross Richendrfer to take a swipe at the study as having “’major flaws,’ including ‘an exceedingly small sample size,” as well as “outdated two-year-old data.’”
The Post piece also quoted the same study author saying the study shows no one "deliberately" tried to influence elections.
But the core concerns expressed by GOP lawmakers and aides stem from the finding that Gmail’s spam filter skewed against GOP candidates at all, and more so than Outlook’s and Yahoo’s spam filters disadvantaged Democratic Party candidates. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) laid this out in a recent letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding he answer, “Why, in Google’s view, is Gmail’s filtering algorithm bias so much more pronounced than Outlook and Yahoo’s bias?”
The NC State study plainly stated that Google’s, Outlook’s and Microsoft’s filtering biases could have an “unignorable impact” on election outcomes, and the study included no pretense of accusing Gmail of “deliberately” trying to influence elections.
It’s unclear whether The Post wants you to know that based on its reporting.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your local representative and demand that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives.
