Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has expressed concerns about Alphabet’s administration of Gmail. In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Ferguson mentioned a story in the New York Post, which described complaints by Targeted Victory (a consulting and PR firm that’s worked with the Republican National Committee and Elon Musk’s X) that said 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 but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats,” Ferguson wrote. He told the tech giant that Gmail’s filters “keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices,” adding that this could lead to “an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action.”
READ: Apple prevails as Britain drops demand for iPhone encryption ‘backdoor’ (August 19, 2025)
Ferguson also noted a recent complaint from Republican senatorial and congressional committee chairs about “Big Tech suppression of conservative speech.”
“A consumer’s right to hear from candidates or parties, including solicitations for donations, is not diminished because that consumer’s political preferences may run counter to your company’s or your employees’ political preferences,” he said.
A Google spokesperson responded by saying that Gmail’s spam filters “look at a variety of objective signals – like whether people mark a particular email as spam, or if a particular ad agency is sending a high volume of emails that are often marked by people as spam,” and that this approached applied “equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”
“We will review this letter and look forward to engaging constructively,” the spokesperson added.
In 2023, the Federal Election Commission investigated and ultimately dismissed, in a bipartisan decision, a bias complaint that claimed Gmail favored Democratic candidates. A similar complaint was dismissed later that year, with a federal judge suggesting that while it was a “close case” the Republican National Committee had not “sufficiently pleaded that Google acted in bad faith.”
Republicans have been claiming for over a decade that big tech companies were biased against them. There has been some change in this since the election, with prominent tech CEOs attending the presidential inauguration, however, GOP congressional campaign arms remain suspicious of Google.
Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the FTC’s investigation into the left-leaning group Media Matters over its research into antisemitic content on X, claiming that the investigation was “a retaliatory act.”