To no one’s surprise, politicians are wrong about iOS 26 message filtering

The iOS 26 message filter drawing political outrage isn’t new, won’t enabled by default, and might actually make it easier for some texts to be seen.

Screen Unknown Senders

At WWDC 2025, Apple told users that iOS 26 will give users more control over messages from unknown senders. As a result, politicians began publicly decrying the feature, saying it’d cost them millions of dollars in political donations.

Of course, never mind the fact that the feature has existed, in some form, since 2019 with the advent of iOS 13. The feature is currently known as “Filter Unknown Senders,” and while it’s opt-in only, it actually does the thing that people assume iOS 26 will do — filter out messages with no regard to content.

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