Congressman complains that Google CEO should fix his father’s Gmail spam filter

Individually gifted with four of the world’s most powerful tech executives, Republican Congressman Greg Steube of Florida decided to question Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Gmail’s spam folders.

We’ve all had issues with spam folders, but Steube suggested to Pichai that his campaign emails sent to spam were part of a nefarious anti-preservation plot.

Pichai and three other top technology CEOs – Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tim Cook of Apple – testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law on Wednesday.

After complaining about being unable to Google the far-right Gateway Pundit website, Steube spent much of his allotted five minutes in the Gmail spam folder.

Steube claimed that when he transitioned from state politics to Congress, people were suddenly unable to receive his campaign emails.

“My parents, who have a Gmail account, do not receive emails from my campaign,” he told Pichai. “My followers, last week, one of my followers called me and said, ‘Hey, I just want you to know this, that my Gmail account is suddenly receiving emails from your campaign that I have received for almost 10 years and suddenly we go to the spam and junk folders. “

Without taking a moment to ask a question, Steube quickly went from solving his parents’ email to alleging a plot against the Conservatives.

“This is, it seems, only happening to conservative Republicans,” Steube said. “I don’t see anything on the news or in the press or other members across the aisle talking about their campaign emails being dumped into junk folders in Gmail. So my question is: Why is this just happening? to the republicans?

Pichai, for his part, calmly rejected the idea that there was a conspiracy against the Republican emails.

“We are focused on what users want and users have indicated that they want us to organize personal emails, emails they receive from friends and family, separately,” said the Google CEO. “All we have done is have a tabbed organization, and the main tab has email from friends and family, and the secondary tab has other notifications.”

Steube, seemingly not understanding that perhaps his campaign email was pushed to a different tab because it was not from a personal account, asked why his own father would not receive a campaign email if family messages go to the main tab.

“Well, it was my father who wasn’t receiving my campaign emails now. Clearly, that familiar thing you’re talking about didn’t apply to my emails,” Steube said.

Pichai responded by explaining that Gmail’s systems probably had no way of knowing that his father was related to the candidate in a campaign email.

The markup actually investigated how Gmail ranks political messages in February. Their review found that only 11 percent made it to the main tab, while half went to “promotions” and about 40 percent went to “spam.”

“We found that Gmail often places political email in the Promotions folder, which it says is for marketing,” wrote Markup reporter Adrianne Jeffries on Twitter. “But there was no partisan pattern.”

For what it’s worth, the representative who spoke after Steube, Florida Democrat Val Demings, pointed out that Republicans were definitely not alone in their problems with the spam folder.

“Just for the record, I’m a Democrat from Florida and I’ve also heard complaints about my emails going into spam,” Demings said.