GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work(krebsonsecurity.com)
krebsonsecurity.com
GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/09/gop-cries-censorship-over-spam-filters-that-work/
28 comments
A bit off topic, that 3D line chart [1] makes the data harder to read instead of clearer. A simple 2D line chart would show the trends without the distortion from perspective. The Data Visualisation Catalogue [2] is a good resource with professional examples and design principles that explain why simplicity usually works best.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/koli-...
[2] https://datavizcatalogue.com/
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/koli-...
[2] https://datavizcatalogue.com/
Even baseless accusations like this are likely to lead to capitulation by companies out of fear of reprisal from the rest of the trump administration. We can look forward to explicitly allowlisted winred advertising from here on out I'm sure.
This is the entire point. They 100% know what they're doing here. They will always just blame everyone else for their incompetency
If they 100% know what they're doing, it's not incompetence, by definition.
One does have to wonder about their motives tho
One does have to wonder about their motives tho
> If they 100% know what they're doing, it's not incompetence, by definition.
I think this assumes that the "thing they're doing" makes sense in the first place, but afaik there's no guarantee of that.
I think this assumes that the "thing they're doing" makes sense in the first place, but afaik there's no guarantee of that.
The incompetency is that they can't fundraise effectively on their own.
And they know their claims are bullshit here. But they think making up some nonsense bullshit and crying about it will let them bully folks as they please.
So far there's been virtually no penalties for being a nasty vicious little cry-bully anywhere. It doesn't always work but theres never a penalty. Smao they they try again here.
And they know their claims are bullshit here. But they think making up some nonsense bullshit and crying about it will let them bully folks as they please.
So far there's been virtually no penalties for being a nasty vicious little cry-bully anywhere. It doesn't always work but theres never a penalty. Smao they they try again here.
It feels like companies aren't being petty enough when it comes to governments mucking in their operations. "You're right, we don't want to appear to be participating in favoritism, our policy going forward will be to block all emails of a political nature by default. Users interested in seeing these messages can re-enable them in settings."
The only winning move with governments fighting bullshit proxy wars on your platform is not to play.
The only winning move with governments fighting bullshit proxy wars on your platform is not to play.
I wish they'd go lower. We are a capitalistic system right? So what they should simply say is that "Our metrics showed our revenue, user retention, and usage numbers were shown to be higher when we blocked this right wing donor spam and content and we have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders". And as a private company their First amendment right allows them to do so.
Watch the bitchfit thrown then.
Watch the bitchfit thrown then.
What difference will this make though?
People who aren't interested will unsubscribe or manually mark as spam.
People who are interested and willing to donate were already receiving the emails and donating anyway, right?
It's not like there's a big group of people who would donate, but who are not technically literate enough to check their spam folder, right?
People who aren't interested will unsubscribe or manually mark as spam.
People who are interested and willing to donate were already receiving the emails and donating anyway, right?
It's not like there's a big group of people who would donate, but who are not technically literate enough to check their spam folder, right?
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Are you being sarcastic or not?
Your last two questions are obviously sarcastic to me, but your first two sentences send the opposite message.
Your last two questions are obviously sarcastic to me, but your first two sentences send the opposite message.
I'm thinking out loud through the logical ramifications of why anyone would be upset at a proposed change to the current practice.
Because if there were a large number of people who would be willing to donate, and the only reason they're not donating is that these emails are being sent to spam at elevated rates... that would kind of justify the administration targeting Google's spam filtering practices here, on grounds that Google's practices are having a material, negative impact on the democratic political process on a partisan basis, whether intentional or not, no?
Because if there were a large number of people who would be willing to donate, and the only reason they're not donating is that these emails are being sent to spam at elevated rates... that would kind of justify the administration targeting Google's spam filtering practices here, on grounds that Google's practices are having a material, negative impact on the democratic political process on a partisan basis, whether intentional or not, no?
If the spam filter is applied equally, but one actor is doing a filter-triggering action more than the other actor, then no, it would not justify the complaint.
If that means I can send a regular email to a gmail address from my own custom domain without being systematically classified as spam, I will take the win. Next win would be for gmail to police their own spamming activity. The gmail domain is the single largest source of spam I receive.
You seem to still be operating with an idea that general principles matter here, as opposed to merely naked authoritarian power. Is your "own custom domain" winred.com, or do you otherwise have the ear of one of the anti-American butchers currently defiling the White House? If not, then no.
Clarification question, since I'm curious. I don't believe I've ever received a spam message from a Gmail domain on any of my email addresses, some of which are posted publicly ([email protected] addresses for businesses). I do see lots of phishing attempts from Gmail addresses attempting to impersonate Facebook ad support and similar types of very loosely targeted low-effort phishing. Am I an outlier, or are you seeing actual spam coming from Gmail addresses? To be clear, I'm calling spam unrequested marketing and nigerien prince type scams. I'm just curious, since that doesn't align with my experience at all.
Not general marketing emails, rather loosely targeted phishing or pointless spam email (one liners which I am not sure what point they serve other than nuisance) from leaked email addresses.
The benefit of having a custom domain is that I provide distinct email aliases to each website, which I keep track of, so I know which website leaked an address (and I also see those email aliases in the failed login attempts to my mail servers).
That also allows me to severe my relationship with a website if they start spamming me, so that may also create a selection bias since I am unaffected by the sort of spam resulting from the same email address being leaked to data brokers and used for marketing, because I delete the alias at the first offense. So I get mostly hit by websites that got hacked.
The benefit of having a custom domain is that I provide distinct email aliases to each website, which I keep track of, so I know which website leaked an address (and I also see those email aliases in the failed login attempts to my mail servers).
That also allows me to severe my relationship with a website if they start spamming me, so that may also create a selection bias since I am unaffected by the sort of spam resulting from the same email address being leaked to data brokers and used for marketing, because I delete the alias at the first offense. So I get mostly hit by websites that got hacked.
It won’t
People will flee the platform if they’re forced to swim through spammy winred emails. A new email provider will crop up that uses personalized AI model instead of global spam lists which will accomplish the same thing but can attribute the spam flag as a users preference ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The donation I sent Ron Paul in 2008 has wound up being the most expensive $10 I've ever spent.
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Last week's news Krebs why are you writing about this now. Number of submissions around here from Ars, TC etc.
It's just not that interesting because it's such a partisan baseless claim.
It's just not that interesting because it's such a partisan baseless claim.
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More spammy than ActBlue must be pretty insanely spammy.
jjani(1)
The thing about spam classification is that it has virtually nothing to do with the message body. It has very very little to do with what the message says and it is all about how the message arrived. Anyway there is no objective definition of "spam", it is simply the outcome of a huge, crowdsourced set of labels.
ActBlue doesn’t send fundraising emails. Campaigns use other mass mailer tools to do that. ActBlue just processes the credit cards, and gives the campaigns links to forms to process the credit cards.