GOP Senator Marco Rubio Accuses Google of Attempting to Undermine His Reelection Campaign

MIAMI, FL – Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has accused Google of attempting to undermine his reelection bid in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, claiming that the tech giant has been blocking his subscribed followers from receiving his emails.

Rubio issued the claim via a tweet this past Saturday, saying that Google is attempting to support Rep. Val Demings, who is attempting to gain the nomination of the Democratic party to run against the incumbent Republican in November.

“Marco Rubio for Senate is in @Google purgatory Since a Pelosi puppet announced she was running against me they have sent 66% of my emails to REGISTERED SUPPORTERS with @gmail to spam,” he said. “And during the final weeks of finance quarters it climbs to over 90%”

Rubio did not provide any proof for his accusation, but referred to a recent report from North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science that examined political communication during the 2020 presidential campaign.

The study concluded that Google has displayed a consistent left-wing bias, and consequently sends far more emails from conservatives to recipient’s spam folders as a result when compared to other email providers.

“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 study said. “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 also said that the volume of emails from right-wing candidates increased on a regular basis as the election drew closer, whereas the volume of emails from left-wing candidates that successfully reached their intended inboxes was maintained.

Google has denied accusations that it tampers with conservative political candidate emails.

“Political affiliation has absolutely no bearing on mail classifications in Gmail and we’ve debunked this suggestion, which has surfaced periodically from across the political spectrum, for many years,” a Google spokesman said. “Mail classifications in Gmail automatically adjust to match Gmail users’ preferences and actions. Gmail users can move messages to spam, or to any other category. Gmail automatically adjusts the classifications of particular emails according to these user actions.”

However, after a lunch meeting with several GOP senators last week to discuss North Carolina State University’s study, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated that “Google deflected, refused to provide any data, repeatedly refused to answer direct questions” about their email policies.