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

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...

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

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.

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

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?

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.