FTC chair warns Alphabet about Gmail’s ‘partisan’ spam filters
Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently expressed concern that “Alphabet’s administration of Gmail is designed to have partisan effects.” In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Ferguson pointed to a recent story in the New York Post describing complaints by Targeted Victory (a consulting and PR firm that’s worked with the Republican National Committee and Elon Musk’s X) claiming that Gmail flags emails linking to the Republican fundraising platform WinRed as spam, without doing the same to emails linking to the Democratic platform ActBlue. “My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders…
