Is there a way to stop all the political text messages? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to stop all the political text messages?

azfamily.com

4 pointsimzadi10 comments

It's totally out of hand.

Both political parties maintain databases with contact info of everyone they can (it's really hard to say for sure if someone is truly with one party or the other, so collect info on everyone and assign probabilities!). Campaigns have access to this info and do with it what they will.

For the smaller campaigns, a campaign worker will log in and say "based on metrics A, B, and C, give me a list of people in this geographic area that have a likelihood greater than X of voting for my political party". They give this list to their volunteers who then use either their personal phone or grab a burner phone out of a huge bag and start sending texts. For the bigger campaigns it is much more automated using services that charge per hundred or thousand.

I'm the "precinct boss" for my area and I'm supposed to keep the database up to date with any contact info I get directly from voters. I (and many of the others in my area) refuse to do so and keep anything I get completely private. I refuse to contact any voter on behalf of any candidate; I will only tell them about all the candidates and give pertinent info, etc. I can get away with it as long as nobody else collects 15 signatures to get themselves on the ballot to challenge me. That's a pretty low bar :). But the folks running the database for the national party don't like it and threaten to take away my access. Oh well.

I've been sketching out an alternative based on push notifications, where the user has control over which notifications are delivered and campaigns and candidates can't do anything about it. Not surprisingly, this is not a popular idea with political parties.

I wonder if they have ever measured the degree to which they are shooting themselves in the foot with these aggressive tactics? Perhaps they have, and the math works out - but it would not surprise me if they simply don't know.

The relentless, years-long torrent of histrionic, sky-is-falling begging spam I got after making one single donation to one political candidate, one time, ensured that it would be the only time.

I've been wondering the same thing for a long time. I once made the mistake of making a political donation, and was then relentlessly hounded for years by all sorts of politicians and political groups.

I will never, ever, make that mistake again.

> they simply don't know

I don't think they know. The candidates are worried about the job that they are campaigning for. There is some manager or whatever that is worried about the details and their job is to win the campaign. The next campaign starts anew and is either won or lost - there is no "almost". The volunteers and other workers are almost universally fresh young people doing this for the first time ever.

Keep in mind that if you get so frustrated with political party A, switching to political party B doesn't change this experience. So what are you going to do? Not vote at all? It will probably take 5-10 years of not voting before you drop off their lists.

I would pay good money for an app that would block political texts and not send equally annoying notifications. I tried Robokiller, but you have to use their text messaging app, which is complete garbage.

either: give up phones entire (best and easiest)

or: communicate with political campaigns and other such entities using disposable phone number / ident tokens, that you then dispose of

maybe you could just delete the messaging app that receives text messages? though if you're not pon an unlimited plan, maybe you'll still get charged for them?

I stopped communicating with political entities at all, other than to reply STOP; roughly three years of patience with this approach reduced the torrent of spam to an acceptably-minimal trickle.

This is what worked for me. Also, I instantly and remorselessly block any number that sends any marketing or political text that trickles through.

So far this year, I haven't received a single political message. My efforts have been worthwhile!

replying "stop" has worked well for me

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