GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work
Summary: FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on August 28 demanding to know why Gmail was allegedly blocking Republican fundraising messages from WinRed while letting Democratic platform ActBlue through, citing a New York Post story and a memo from consulting firm Targeted Victory. Spam intelligence firms Koli-Lõks and SURBL told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed's emails hit their spamtraps far more often than ActBlue's - Koli-Lõks showed a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed in the final week of July 2025 - and SURBL CEO Raymond Dijkxhoorn attributed the domain reputation damage to sending mechanics, not content or politics.
What you should know: The FTC chairman is pressing a spam-filtering question as a potential unfair or deceptive practice under the FTC Act, while the blocklist operators say the disparity comes from WinRed's own sending behavior - so the outcome will turn on whether a regulator accepts sender-reputation data over a political framing.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
- Related
- TSMC employee data breach linked to cloud provider Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026Data Breach at La Poste Subsidiary Maileva Affects 22 Million People in France Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026City of Osaka warns of data breach impacting 1 million as Japan reels from dozens of cyber incidents Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026