It's not uncommon for the American Thinker staff to learn that emails from readers and writers have vanished into Gmail's automatic spam filter.  It's extremely irritating, but is it deliberate?  One study suggests that it probably is.  That's either because the email's content is obviously conservative or because the email comes from ProtonMail, a site to which conservatives gravitated after the FBI's partisan crackdown following January 6.

Six years ago, Russ Vaughn authored an American Thinker post revealing that his email box appeared to show a distinct bias in the way Google automatically sorted email:

I decided to clean out my email trash, and after completing the task, I turned to my spam to do the same.  But upon clicking into that folder, I made the interesting discovery that almost all of the emails relegated to spam by Gmail's filters (I have no personal filters in place) had a common thread: Almost all were from conservative sources.  In fact, ninety percent of them were from Republican or conservative causes, most seeking contributions. 

It turns out that what Russ observed was not limited to his own inbox.  North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science decided to look into the matter.  Fox News reports that it recently published its findings in "A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020."  The results completely supported Russ's suspicions:

"We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. 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 proposed methodology section continued. "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 "further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same" in the days leading up to Election Day.

[snip]

Google's extremely popular email service was found to be overwhelmingly in favor of content from liberal candidates. 

"We further observe that Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6%) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2%)" researchers wrote. "Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates." 

In other words, not only was Big Tech hiding general news stories from you on social media, but Google's algorithm was designed so that it hid potentially useful information mailed directly to your inbox.

Image: Phantom emails by creativeart.  Freepik license.

I've been using Gmail since 2004 when it first launched and I was invited to be a Beta tester.  I've been a loyal Gmail user since then because I love how it works.

American Thinker's email also runs over Gmail and, as with my personal accounts, has for almost two decades.  We editors have learned to check our spam folders regularly to see whether Gmail weeded out important information and emails.  I've also created a dedicated filter that reroutes all emails from ProtonMail from the spam folder to my inbox.

If you like Gmail's user interface, keep using it.  Just be aware that Gmail will hide conservative content from you and that it's your responsibility to hunt it down.

Also, if you've written something for American Thinker (here are our guidelines), and you don't get a reply, don't assume we're ignoring you.  If you're using ProtonMail, we may not know you're out there.  And even if you're not using ProtonMail, we might not have received your email.  So, after 24 hours, it's perfectly fine to send a polite inquiry.