Incident 403: GMail's Inbox Sorting Reportedly Negatively Impacted Political Emails and Call-to-Actions

Description: Google GMail's inbox sorting algorithm for political emails was reported by presidential candidates, nonprofits, and advocacy groups for having negative impact on call-to-actions, allegedly suppressing donations and impeding political actions.

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Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed political organizations and political candidates.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
403
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2018-01-15
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident Occurrence+1
Swinging the Vote?
Swinging the Vote?
themarkup.org · 2020

Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent.

These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they r…

How We Examined Gmail’s Treatment of Political Emails
themarkup.org · 2020

Introduction

In early 2018, several advocacy groups noticed a drop in open rates for subscribers with Gmail domains. They said this had a negative impact on calls to action and donations. 

Using data sent to us by three of these advocacy …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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