Washington, D.C. – Congresswoman Elise Stefanik cosponsored the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act (Political BIAS Emails Act) to hold Big Tech accountable for using biased algorithms that filter political emails and to increase transparency on the censorship practices used by Big Tech companies.
“Using algorithms to filter conservative emails as spam is one more way Big Tech is censoring conservative ideas, and I am proud to join my colleagues in addressing this issue by increasing transparency for Big Tech’s actions,” Stefanik said. “Emails should not be subject to politicized filters, because the American people should be able to receive information without Big Tech picking and choosing their political priorities.”
The Political BIAS Emails Act, led by Congresswoman Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), prohibits email services from using filtering algorithms on emails from federal political campaigns or campaign committees unless an email user took an action to apply a label, such as spam, for the email. This legislation also requires operators of email services to produce quarterly transparency reports and requires email services to disclose information to the individual campaigns on the percentage of emails flagged as spam, the total number of emails that reached an email user’s primary inbox, and a summary as to why emails from the individual campaign did not reach a user’s primary inbox.
