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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit against Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc’s Google that was brought late last year by the Republican National Committee for allegedly sending its emails to users’ spam folders.
In a filing made on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta said that while it was a “close case,” the political committee had not “sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith” in filtering RNC messages into the spam folders of users of its Gmail service.
“Accordingly, the Court will GRANT Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss, with partial leave to amend,” the judge wrote.
The RNC filed the lawsuit against Google in October last year and claimed Google was “discriminating” against the political committee based on its conservative views and had sent the organization’s bulk emails for election fundraising and other matters to spam folders.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in California. Google rejected the claims. Lawyers for Google at law firm Perkins called the allegations a “far-fetched theory” and a “dark conspiracy.”
Spam filters on email services typically weed out unsolicited “spam” messages and divert them to a separate folder.
Republicans have long accused big tech companies of discriminating against conservative views and suppressing free speech, an assertion the companies strongly deny.
