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Comment by andrewfong | Hacker News Reader

U.S. political campaigns are by far the worst offender. If you give your real email and phone number to one candidate, twenty unrelated candidates will contact you next cycle.

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You don't even have to give it to a campaign. When I moved in 2020, I updated by address and phone number with the Secretary of State to transfer to a voting precinct in my new town. Unfortunately that information is available to anyone willing to spend something like $20 for a quarterly DVD. It started off as relentless SMS spam from not just campaigns, but also activists groups. Not long after, the spam for penis enlargement pills, hair loss creams, and horny women looking for a man just like me started. Then came the robocalls. None of these were a problem before I updated my address and phone number. Really wish I had only updated my address but that would simply make whoever has my old phone number a victim of that same trash.

I get this stuff from US politicians and I don’t live in the US. Random drive by mails with hysterical instructions to save us from the Dems/Republicans. I thought it was all incredibly targeted by now, but there’s obviously some terrible list management going on. At least no robocalls.

This is likely because they use the same one or two CRMs. There’s one from the Democratic Party and one independent one, from what I tecall

This. It's relentless. Both email and SMS spam.

With SMS, you can reply with STOP and it should take you off that list. Repeat for a few campaigns and hopefully you are done for that election cycle and get less/none in the next cycle.

Where I live, the political spam appears to be crowd sourced. Rarely is the same number used more than a couple of times. Most of it is of the form "Hi, this is Robyn from the Justice Democrats. Can we rely on your vote on Tuesday for candidate so-and-so?". Asking them to stop only stops that one person from spamming. As an aside, it's interesting to see the large difference in SMS campaigning between parties. I get very little of it from Republicans but lots of it from Democrats. No idea if this is due to a certain demographic profile I match or that the two have different advertising philosophies (I get far more physical campaign mail from Republicans than from Democrats).

It's demographic. Almost all of my SMS and phone spam is from the GOP. For whatever reason, about 15 years ago, they started thinking I'm my grandmother when I was the process of moving across the country and stayed with her for a week, and have been relentlessly telling Dora about the downfall of America if she doesn't do something ever since. Amazingly, she is still alive, but nearly 90, and I imagine they will continue doing this long after she is gone, spamming the wrong number of a corpse.

This was actually the only political spam I got for most of my life until my wife got mad at me for never voting and I finally registered. Then the Democrats must have trawled the public records and they started spamming me, too. I'm so glad to have participated in democracy. Things are clearly much better in 2022 than in 2019 because I voted.

A lot of the techniques like text-banking were developed out of outsider campaigns attempting to dethrone existing power structures. So in an way it worked...just not good enough. AOC can't do anything when its only her and a handful of others. The party got wise and in 2020 put all their efforts to stomp out more AOC's. So yeah, you are not going to get real change until a large chunk of people start voting. Turnout in non Presidential primaries is typically like ~10-15%. Pathetic.

The applications they use rely on some backend like Twilio. The STOP goes to the campaign's system.

> I get very little of it from Republicans but lots of it from Democrats.

Have you donated money to Republicans? How about Democrats? What are you registered as? What have you been registered as before?

That has not stopped it. I get SMS spam from different phone numbers (even for the same campaigns) constantly. It's really frustrating.

After you unsubscribe to about 10 different mailing lists it stops coming.

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