I Replied 'Stop' to a Political Text Message. I Got 100 More

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/political-text-messages-stop-17cf2abb

by pcl • 2 years ago

46 41 2 years ago

pinewurst• 2 years ago

This is straight out of the spammer's playbook. If you complain, they just send you more. Really abusive, and one of the lesser reasons why people hated spammers. "Once a spammer, always a spammer".

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

I remain convinced you can generate cheap power by having everyone in your neighborhood donate small amounts of money to a wide variety of non-profits, and burn the resulting flood of mail.

senortumnus• 2 years ago

Please do this, for science!

crazygringo• 2 years ago

I am... genuinely curious if this is a viable method for free fuel.

Less so with non-profits, more for things like catalogs, free magazine things, etc.

Like can you power a "wood" stove with enough dense paper? And if you're getting 100 heavy catalogs a day, will the USPS keep delivering them?

Or is there some kind of practical limit that the USPS won't do residential delivery of commercial mail beyond a certain daily amount?

Surely there's some reason you can't heat your house this way.

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what the general policy is, but here they will ask you to pick up your mail if you receive too much.

The sender is paying, and they are generally pleased people are giving then money.

willcipriano• 2 years ago

Probably have to compress the paper like those logs they sell for easier campfires.[0]

Loose paper burns quickly so you'd be filling up the stove constantly.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Pine-Mountain-Traditional-Campfire-Fi...

akomtu• 2 years ago

$100 = 600 kWh = 450 lbs of firewood. That's a big pile of mail to burn.

gorlilla• 2 years ago

You would need approximately 256 pounds of wood pellets (8,000 BTU/lb) to generate 600 kWh of electricity.

infotainment• 2 years ago

Reminds me of in the olden days, nonprofits would often send donation return envelopes with valid, non-cancelled stamps on them.

If you weren't inclined to send in another donation, you could remove those stamps and use them for your own mail!

grugagag• 2 years ago

I never respond to those. Any response is an acknowlefgement they have a person on the other end and that’s to become a target for a deluge of crap. I just mark them as junk and never respond. Im not willing to provide any info to the spammer.

CrendKing• 2 years ago

I don't understand the strategy from the election spammer here. They clearly want the recipient to vote/donate. But if someone spends time to type "STOP" instead of ignoring, he has clearly read the message and not interested in the solicitation. Then why spam this particular number? The more flood the more he hates you, the less he's gonna to anything positive to you. It is a extremely low quality "live number" for the campaign, and waste of money.

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years ago

Maybe it makes sense to whoever they outsourced the job to

justsomehnguy• 2 years ago

They clearly want the recipient to vote/donate

Lol, no.

Just like SEO and the e/mail spam nobody actually cares about the result. The process itself, 'engagement' - is the target.

Just imagine, you are the spammer and you are presenting the numbers to whoever who ordered this:

"Hey, we sent 1000 SMS, got 900 STOP replies, that's good, right? That would cost you $1000 for the SMS and $100 for our time. "

And compare it with this:

"Hey, we sent 15043401 SMS, got 9000 replies, overall engagement is over 78% and we can continue for another week or two! BTW it's $15043401 for the SMS and $100000 for our time"

Which variant the spammer would prefer?

abbefaria27• 2 years ago

In the past 3 weeks I blocked, no exaggeration, about 350 of these same text messages. They’re almost all for republican fundraisers, and almost always either unscrupulous or borderline fraudulent. Stuff like “50X match if you donate now!”, or “our records indicate you’re voting for Kamala. Click now to set the record straight!”. Sending “Stop” or marking as spam does nothing of course, so I had to get a blocker app. I did finally click on a couple out of curiosity (how much worse could the spam get) and they use every dark pattern there is to try to force a recurring donation. I don’t really get how it’s worth it, but I guess some people must go for it.

Marsymars• 2 years ago

They’re almost all for republican fundraisers

I'm not American and have never lived in America, but I get email spam for republican, and only republican fundraisers. Unsubscribe seems to work poorly or not at all, the wording seems similarly unscrupulous/borderline fraudulent.

So I mark them as spam in gmail/outlook. And I assume this is why there are cases like this: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/1/24211217/judge-dismisses-r...

mbrumlow• 2 years ago

To even this out I got about as many but for democrats. I think calling out the party says more about you than the practice.

My guess is they are all scams. I get the same 500x match to beat Trump 10 or more times a day.

e40• 2 years ago

I think your accusation says more about you than the commentor you replied to.

llamaimperative• 2 years ago

As someone who receives texts from both parties, my experience has been a higher volume of texts from Dems (probably because I’ve donated to more distinct blue-ish groups) but WAY, WAY more predatory and scammy ones from Republicans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/10/us/politics/t...

Normal donation texts are not “scams.” Scams on top of donations are.

b3ing• 2 years ago

Report them to the FTC

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

Well, that's absurd. The FTC will calmly tell you that you're not being spammed. These are legitimate communications.

There is an explicit carve-out for all political/election related communications to voters. You can't opt-out by DoNotCall and you can't suppress your contact info from the public voter rolls. (They also know when you cast your ballots--there's currently someone hounding me about it, and their entire mission is to explicitly hound people until the vote is cast.)

This is even a stronger affinity than companies who have a current business relationship with you. You can individually get out of those, but you will always receive political communications.

It doesn't matter if it's a shady, fly-by-night out-of-state PAC with dark money, or whether it's the Lord Emperor For Life Himself on the phone, it's all equally legitimated, and nobody will dare legislate against it.

blargey• 2 years ago

A few weeks ago I got fed up and replied STOP to every political text in my inbox. It worked, because I'd forgotten about their existence until seeing this title.

I guess my number never got to the less scrupulous actors in this space?

hun3• 2 years ago

IIRC some carriers explicitly recognize "STOP" (exact phase) as a special directive to block the sender for marketing messages.

ctippett• 2 years ago

I had no idea Apple supports third-party apps that can filter messages.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/sms-filtering/

theogravity2• 2 years ago

Anyone know of an app that deals with these kinds of texts?

atommclain• 2 years ago

I found Bouncer to be a good fit for me. Free, open source, and uses regex.

But it doesn’t come with a block list, so you have to construct your own.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bouncer-text-messages-blocker/...

heroprotagonist• 2 years ago

I've gotten hundreds on android and they've all been blocked automatically. I do have this ever-present 'Spam detected' line in my notifications. I can get rid of it, but I kind of like seeing it, just in case.

Every several days I'll scroll through in case something was mistakenly flagged, and it never is.

tech234a2• 2 years ago

SMS Spam Block is a good free option if you just want to make a simple keyword list: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sms-spam-block/id1283355601

shaboinkin• 2 years ago

I like how the generated response after a “stop” is “You will not receive any more messages from this number.” Where they turn around and send you a message from a different number. How about a “take me out of your database” option?

xanderlewis• 2 years ago

I didn’t even realise these existed. Living in the UK, I’ve never received a single unsolicited text message from a political party or any kind of campaign. I wonder why there’s such a difference…

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

I haven’t received any in California either.

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

It's not that cheap to operate and pretty poor conversion. So given the spending cap of £34m per party in the year before the election, it's probably not worth it.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

I unsubscribed from the entirety of the Republican party. Their batshit crazy scam spam stopped for a day and then resumed in full force.

Constant spam begging for money from every looney congress critter you can name. Unbelievable.

ncr100• 2 years ago

Google Fi, works great to stop spamming.

I have donated and shared my tel no, and had to stop 4x. That is it this season.

Checking my spam folder for texts, it has several, not hundreds, so is not as bad as others here.

ossm1db• 2 years ago

I replied, "Stop the lies!" and they quit. Maybe coincidence though.

lazide• 2 years ago

My favorite bit of honesty is when I started to get texts from ‘We won’t stop calling, we won’t stop texting’. Those are some balls.

chardgor• 2 years ago

I’d like to see a 1 cent tax on emails. I’d be happy to pay it and it would stop all the spam.

jfengel• 2 years ago

I see very little of this, and I believe it's because Google's service (Pixel phone on Google Fi) is filtering them. I see messages every day about calls and texts being blocked as spam. Some are undoubtedly regular spam, but I see it much more recently, and I bet it will decline rapidly next week.

Yeah, I know that I'm selling my soul to Google to be so deeply embedded in their ecosystem. But there are definitely perks.

I Replied 'Stop' to a Political Text Message. I Got 100 More

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