• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 14, 2022

Republican Senator John Thune said Tuesday that he will introduce legislation that would prohibit large tech companies from “censoring” political emails.

In remarks made to the press and posted to Twitter, the South Dakota lawmaker said the Republicans say that some platforms, including Google, “have been discriminating against some of the content put out in the 2020 election.”

“Republicans have a better vision for the future of our country, but Google is standing between us and our constituents when we try to communicate it,” he elaborated in a written post accompanying a video of his press conference.

The lawmaker went on to reference a study conducted in 2020 that found Google flagged 67.5% of emails from Republican candidates as spam, compared to 8.2% from Democrats.

The study authors deny that their findings show Google acted out of deliberate anti-conservative bias.

Thune said Tuesday that he and other Republicans were filing a bill that would “go after and prohibit these big platforms from censoring or discriminating against political emails.”

“This is a big problem,” Thune said. “We need more transparency out of these social media platforms, more accountability, and we want to make sure that they have to disclose their practices, and that they are not discriminating against any political party or political candidate, or any political emails.”