House Republican introduced new legislation aimed to end Big Tech’s bias. The Political BIAS Emails Act intends to end biased algorithms used by Big Tech to filter political email. Another goal of the bill is to increase transparency on the filtering process that Big Tech companies use, requiring operators of email services to generate quarterly transparency reports.
Republican Leader McCarthy noted research from North Carolina State University. It stated that 70 percent of emails from candidates registered with the Republican Party ended up in spam email boxes by Google. The researchers compared those numbers to emails from Democratic candidates, showing that less than 1 in 10 of those emails advanced to spam inboxes from 2019 to 2020. Gmail controls roughly 50 percent of the email market in the US, meaning approximately 130.9 million Americans have felt the effect of Google's disparity in political coverage.
Leader McCarthy said in a statement on the Political BIAS Emails Act, "Today's Big Tech behemoths were once the gold standard of entrepreneurism and innovation, and offered space for the First Amendment to live freely. But over the years, these platforms abandoned these First Amendment principles and have instead chosen to use their immense power to pick a side in our country's political discourse.” He added, "With this bill, Republicans are fighting back against Big Tech's discriminatory infiltration into our political discourse, and will continue to take on Big Tech whenever and wherever they silence political speech."