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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Not to sidetrack too much, but is this not a violation of campaign rules? Aren't all text messages from a political campaign at least supposed to be operated by a human touching a phone somewhere? This is to avoid robodialers and others?

https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts

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From your link:

> if the message’s sender does not use autodialing technology to send such texts and instead manually dials them.

So, there's definitely not enough here to suggest that it's in violation.

Related, what does "manually dial" even mean? A button that changes to the next number each time you tap it? Tapping an entry in a contact? A single "Call" button that enables when a phone line, in the queue of hundreds, is free?

It means you outsource this work to a call center that says they don't use autodialers but does, absolving you of any responsibility

I have friends who have volunteered to call people for various campaigns, they usually sit at a computer and it has the number queued up and they hit dial, and it goes. They do this for hundreds of calls an hour. but its exactly as you said, the next number and name is queued up for you, you hit call.

The initial texts, yes. I think there is some legal wiggleroom with the follow-ups but I don't know if that's been tested in court

We wrote about it here: https://aipoliticalpulse.substack.com/p/is-that-a-pile-of-gp...

I could imagine there being a human being on the other end, copy-pasting all these LLM responses over SMS - and humoring you by keeping it going for a while.

I suppose that would be legal.

It is not clear to me that this would violate the FCC's rules so long as a human pressed a button to initiate the conversation.

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