A federal judge has dismissed the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit against Google, which claimed the tech giant illegally sent some of its messages to spam on Gmail.
In his judgment, US District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta said the RNC had not “sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith,” The Washington Post reports. He noted that while the RNC maintained that everyone who was sent emails from the organization had opted into them at some point in time, that did not mean they were forever welcome in each and every person’s inbox.
“It is clear from the complaint that the RNC sends out a significant number of emails to individuals on its list,” reads the judgment.”While it may be that some, perhaps many, users specifically wanted each and every one of those emails, Google could reasonably consider these mass mailings to be objectionable, just as it can for other email senders.”
He also argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online services with respect to third-party content generated by its users. Google and other tech providers are shielded from these types of lawsuits provided they act in good faith. That law specifically reads: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
According to the Post, the RNC can file an amended complaint that attempts to prove Google did not act in good faith, and the committee says it plans to do so.
The lawsuit stems from a 2022 academic study by researchers at North Carolina State University, which found that Google’s algorithms appear to show a bias against conservative candidates. Tech companies, including Google, have long disputed the claims of the paper, and its authors have told the RNC it is taking its findings out of context.
Last year, Google ran a pilot program that allowed candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership PACs to bypass users' spam folders and make sure their emails land in people's inboxes. That program ended in January.
Google says its spam-filtering policies are applied equally to emails from all senders.