Mailchimp Bans TorrentFreak Occurred on 20 Oct 2019

Mailchimp banned TorrentFreak, a news publication focused on topics around copyright, privacy and file sharing. Mailchimp told TorrentFreak that their automated abuse-prevention system “detected account content that violates our Acceptable Use Policy” and that “the risk associated with your account is too great for us to continue to support.”

A few days ago, our newsletter provider MailChimp kicked us out because our content is too risky for its business. Apparently, overactive spam filters don’t really like the topics we cover.

Ernesto Van der Sar, founder of TorrentFreak, aptly points out that the larger problem here isn’t solely with Mailchimp, but instead also has something to do with the current underlying infrastrucutre of the internet:

What’s really to blame here are the automated filters from ISPs and anti-spam outfits that wrongly tag certain content as problematic. Too many piracy-related keywords, which is what you would find on a piracy-related news site like ours, can apparently get entire servers blocked.