The strongest response to conservative complaints about Gmail is not that the complaints are false, it is that the filtering is legitimate in practice. Security researcher Brian Krebs made that case recently, reporting that emails carrying WinRed donation links hit spam traps at roughly four times the rate of ActBlue mail in late July 2025. The claim rests on the belief that the filters were doing their job, reacting to sender behavior, with no political motivations. 

That argument leaves the more difficult issue untouched, namely, how much unaccountable power a few companies hold over political communication, and how little leverage the ecosystem has over them.