I’m getting spammed excessively by political junk texts. By both sides, left and right, D and R. Anyone else?
Suggested solutions? Any you can recommend? I’m on an iPhone, if that matters.
I can’t wait for voting day so I can vote and be left alone!
Oh yes, 2-3 per day now it seems. Same with TV ads, but not fully going Both-Sides-ism here are the GOP ones are particularly vile and pathologically dishonest.
None. As soon as I donate, I unsubscribe. Still get a few spammy requests here and there, but no onslaught.
I get a plea for money to support (read “send money to”) some Dem somewhere a thousand miles from here 3 or 4x/day. And have every day for the last year. Blocking is useless, each plea comes from a new number.
I’ve never seen a text from the Ratbastards.
In the last couple weeks I’ve seen texts dissing the local R candidate for federal Rep. It happens he was a city councilman near here and was run out of town for corruption. So they don’t have to lie to tar the guy, and his reputation precedes him by a mile at least locally. Not that I was considering voting for him anyhow. But for the people who usually vote Anyone (R), they might get the word.
I’d also say 2-3 a day, almost all Republican.
Report as Spam (though that doesn’t quite world for “Political Ads” for privileged reasons) and move on.
I already have my mail in ballot (all-in since it’s Colorado) and after I finish reviewing all the local ordinances for poison pills, I’ll drop it off in a secure lockbox this Friday.
Oh God yes
At least fifteen a day.
I don’t know what god I pissed off.
I get a few a day, but Pixel phones come with an AI spam filter that blocks 90% of them. Cuts the volume down to a few a month that actually slip through.
It’s a hard problem because iMessage on iOS and RCS on Android mostly rely on the default apps. There are some third-party spam blocker apps but they don’t work all that well, in my experience 
Part of the reason I switched back to Android after a few months with an iPhone… the spam was just unbearable. The Pixel’s built-in filter is dramatically better than any/all of the apps I tried on iPhone.
Hopefully Apple will add better LLM spam blocking with their new Siris…
I thought about building a crowdsourced political anti-spam service, where every time you report a spam text, the service will donate $0.10 to each opponent running in that campaign (capped to some monthly budget). It would name-and-shame all the spam senders and their messages on a public website and proudly highlight how much their spam has helped their enemies…
Is mine just not activated somehow? I have a Pixel 8 Pro.
Hmm, is it not on by default…? How to enable it
You can check your “spam and blocked” category in Google Messages to see what (if anything) it has already blocked
Actually, it might not even be Pixel-exclusive. Seems like just a Google Messages feature now, so all Androids should have access to it…? Maybe it once was in the past, not sure. (edit: ah, it was the AI call screening that’s Pixel-only)
Android phone, I get a few each week, the volume now is only a little higher than what is normal for me. I don’t know if it helps, but I don’t open the texts before I block the number – my screen shows a preview of the first two lines (today it was “from” Ilhan Omar). The ones I get seem to know that I would not be supporting a Republican, I only get liberal-oriented ones.
I wonder how much of this is tied to voter-engagement services like ActBlue, ActionNetwork, WinRed, etc. I swear campaigns share/sell information like this to each other so they can all cross-spam you, especially if you donated any money or signed up for anything.
ActBlue is particularly assholish about this, purposefully not giving you an “opt out of ALL emails/texts” option, only one campaign at a time.
I gave a few grand to AOC and Bernie back in the day, before I realized those were part of FEC public records (check yourself if you want: FEC | Individual Contribution Research). The spam exploded shortly after that and never stopped… but at least now they’re all left-to-center, never Republican.
In most states you need to give the election people your party affiliation when you register to vote. At least you do if you want to be allowed to vote in your party’s primaries. Choosing to not give a party affiliation is choosing to sit out the primary. Other states let you pick your primary ballot at voting time. Or have “jungle” primaries where all the candidates of all the parties are listed together.
Some states make your party affiliation a matter of public record. I live in a state like that. Everybody can know my party affiliation. The spam & the snail junk mail I get seems to reflect that. It’s almost entirely D-spam.
I get almost zero R-spam or anti-D spam. Thank goodness; that shit is nasty. Only time I see how hateful & hatefilled the RW traitor media is is when there’s a TV tuned to Fox wherever I’m eating or drinking. Saw that non-stop a couple nights ago at a sports bar. Not going back.
Didn’t pay much attention to the magic word “text”, parsed it as the endless parade of flyers in my snail mailbox, but, yeah.
Wow, we have gotten 0 appeals for donations in our snail mail box.
But I get 2-3 text messages a day from Talarico and Hinajosa. They both seem to have plenty of money to perform ad buys, so I haven’t donated this time around. I don’t block them as spam, though.
The same one that I pissed off, apparently.
I dunno what I did to AVOID any texts on my phone, but I’m alluding to character assassination flyers by the bushel-load all week long.
Strange… mine is all Republican candidates, or some MAGA* group announcing the latest way the D’s are planning to force our children into GA surgery.
I’m a registered Democrat. I voted for Kamala. I voted for Talarico (primary), etc. etc. But I never get any spam from the Ds, only the Rs.
Weird.
*I swear to Og, there is an actual corporation called “MAGA Inc.” At least that’s what’s appearing in my mailboxes.
I’m not registered with either party but I still get begging texts from groups all over the country. All I can say is I’m glad I’m no longer on a phone plan that charges me per text. I’d be really pissed!! Now I just block and delete.
My Pixel does an excellent job of screening out the calls, and a decent job on the texts. My mom doesn’t donate to political causes, but still gets bombarded with texts. For this election cycle, most of them have been from Texas… She lives in North Carolina.