They're censoring your email

A group did a study that showed that various email programs are far more likely to route email from Republicans to the spam folder than they are to route email from Democrats to the spam folder.

The folks at 100percentfedup set up a variety of email accounts and signed up for the email lists of around 50 different candidates/groups.  They tracked how many emails were sent by each group and of those how many showed up in the inbox and how many showed up in the spam folder.

Clearly people are less likely to see emails that show up in their spam folder so emails that are routed there are effectively censored.

What they found was that it's much more likely for neutral and conservative emails to end up in the spam folder even though Democrats sent four times more email than did Republicans.

Here are three plots for 3 different email providers showing the percentage of emails related to key Senatorial campaigns that went to spam.




Yahoo and AOL sent essentially all Republican emails to spam while sending essentially no Democrat emails to spam.  Surprisingly G Mail was the least biased but still it did work hard to censor Dean Heller.

The study points out that there could be reasons why this happens other than deliberate action but the reality is that it's amazingly unlikely that all the Republicans somehow were incompetent in how they used email and none of the Democrats were.

Also it's possible to structure algorithms, intentionally or unintentionally, so as to be biased for leftists.  For example if leftists are more likely to report a source as spam than Republicans--who just trash the offending email--a "neutral" algorithm could use that information to create a generic spam filter for all their users which declares only Republican emails to be spam.

We see this sort of thing on other social media where leftists, being intolerant and in favor of censorship, are more likely to flag as evil posts they don't like than conservatives are.  That can lead a "neutral" algorithm to selectively censor conservative posts.

Whatever the reason it's clear that if you want to know what email you really get and you're a conservative you need to check your spam folder; which of course defeats the purpose of the spam folder in the first place.