What to Do with Unwanted Political Spam Texts | Hacker News Reader

What to Do with Unwanted Political Spam Texts

daringfireball.net

I just immediately and unhesitatingly block anyone who spams me, regardless of whether or not that spam is political.

Me too, and some days I do miss Dad.

I've resolved to never give money to political campaigns because of the spam.

A donation is not required to get spam. I get a few texts every day from the trump campaign because an old college friend enjoys giving my number out.

The “stop” trick doesn’t work for these messages either, and they each come from a different number so blocking them is impossible.

Me too. Not just campaigns, but any political organization. I made that mistake once years ago, and it took forever for me to stop being spammed as a result of that.

Never again.

It baffles me that people give any money to those crooks in the first place.

(unless you secure a quid pro quo and then it is a bribe and I can see the merit in bribery)

You are sensible to do so! I made one donation, one time, and it took years of "STOP" messages before the ensuing torrent of histrionic begging finally ended. I will never do it again.

My Pixel with Google Fi does a great job of identifying them. I have seen very little campaign text spam, and I used to get a lot of it.

I see a "spam blocked" message every day or so. I'm betting that's political spam. I don't go verify.

> Every single unwanted text message I’ve gotten in the past few years — every one — has been an SMS message, not iMessage. iMessage spam exists, but for me at least it’s a night-and-day difference from SMS. I fail to see how RCS won’t be just as bad or worse (because it supports larger images) than SMS in this regard

Yeah, because It's nigh impossible to send messages over iMessage as a business. I bet you don't get OTP over iMessage either. Or shipping confirmations... or literally any other desirable but non-human messages. Pitting this against SMS & RCS is so dumb and so daringfireball esq. Completely distracts the original (valid) point.

Just reply STOP? This is not a major problem for me. Is it for other people?

Edit: I guess this is my fault for not RTFA.

> Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.

Maybe the headline should be "Reply STOP to political spam SMS"

It's moreso the fact ActBlue shares your contact info with (seemingly) every politician they support, so you're constantly sending STOP to candidates you've never even heard of.

And they have some coordination between PACs (or the PACs are running sub-PACs or something), so that you reply stop, and then tomorrow a different PAC texts you. Rinse and repeat.

Oath.vote supposedly does not sell information but it's a shame they don't get nearly as much attention as ActBlue.

Perhaps it's time for people to start mailing cash and checks to campaigns instead of using online portals. The campaigns only need your name, employer info, and a valid mailing address and often provide forms on their site for this purpose.

Maybe after campaigns see that they're spending a bit more time opening physical mail from small donors they'll reconsider their strategy.

i dont reply stop to unsolicited messages because that is confirmation to them that its an actively monitored number. not sure if being paranoid or smart but if i was spamming a big list it would be beneficial in my eyes to know which numbers were active so i could turn around and flip the filtered known active number list to someone else

Yes, it isn't being paranoid, this is what happens. If you respond in any way, even to tell them to stop, it confirms the number as an active number and your number then becomes valuable. They then either won't let up on contacting you or will sell your now confirmed/valuable number onwards to people that want to buy active numbers for their own, usually nefarious, purposes.

It's not that you have to reply STOP, it's that you may have to reply STOP hundreds of times before the harassment will end. Every little campaign committee has their own mailing list, and they are constantly sharing information about potential donors with each other - but they certainly won't share your STOP request.

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