- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
welcome to the election season in the United States.
God damn I love my Google phone. Every once in a while I check my call logs and spam text folder to see the hundreds of calls and texts it screens for me, without any notifications. It’s nice
It is easily the most important feature on my phone. The call screening and spam blocking is unparalleled. I don’t think I have had anything blocked that shouldn’t be, and it maybe messes up 5 or less times a year.
Call screening is honestly one of the best features to ever come to a phone. I really wish this could be added to every handset.
US politicians not making literally everything about race challenge [IMPOSSIBLE]
LOL
The left has GOT to stop using race/skin color.
As a Democrat, I agree.
But I kinda want to see how deep this goes.
WhiteDudesWhoLikeFriesInTheirMilkshakes4Harris .com
PuertoRicansWhoAreOkayWithTacoBell4Harris .com
BlackAnimeFansWhoAreCasualFansNotLikeThatWeirdShitLikeMyWifeIsADogFromAnotherWorld4Harris .com
lmao.
I’m in one of these oddly specific groups, and I feel both validated and paranoid.
Haha like this?
The left has GOT to stop using race/skin color.
You first.
It’s a pretty relevant distinction within American life. I’m no strategist, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The only people who think race don’t matter is people who exclusively interact within the same race.
It’s a social construct that didn’t exist until the 1600s, but it’s a real social construct.
Outside America and other former plantation economies it can be a bit different, and less in-your-face, but it’s almost always still there.
It’s not purely a social construct, I hate this stupid idea. It’s a phenotype. Babies do not have a randomized skin color at birth, it depends on their ancestry. Calling that a “social construct” is arguably racist in itself.
Skin colour is a complete continuum, and one which doesn’t very in any uniform way based on geography, aside from the darkest people coming recently from Africa.
By this logic, ear size is a race.
Yes! You’re getting it. Ear size is an aspect of race. As is hair texture and height and all the other inheritable phenotypes. Skin color is just the most visibly obvious one.
Well, words can mean whatever you want, but usually race refers to the discrete-ish social categories that have been constructed based roughly on specific phenotypes. For example Black people were a discrete legal category for most of America’s history, and were nominally 3/5 of a person and treated as much less. Now, they have equal legal rights on paper, but the category remains informally.
So you’re saying race == phenotype? Then you also have to say that race is a continuum, and, therefore, any arbitrary line on that continuum a social construct.
Which is btw blindingly obvious to Europeans, Harris is white in my book: There’s plenty of Italians with darker skin. Funny how perception changes if you actually consider skin colour to be skin colour and not some grand overarching signifier for an in reality culturally defined group.
I like to waste as much time as possible with them because I have no life
Actual scambaiting is the closest thing I have to religion these days
A few different things contribute to this and, unfortunately, there’s very little you can do to fix it. I’ve spent (wasted) a ton of time trying to prevent it on my end.
- If you used your phone number on your voter registration, reregister immediately without your phone number. This is public information and it’s where these things start.
- Find contact info for your local, county, and state parties. All sides. Call them up and ask that your information be removed from their database(s). You might have to escalate a bit because usually phone bankers don’t know how to do it or don’t understand why you want privacy. Worst case scenario you can pull out a sob story about an abusive ex and how your information isn’t supposed to be public at all. That will usually get your shit pulled.
- While you’re on those calls, try to find out where they either send or pull their data from. Next go there and do step 2 again.
- Repeat step 3 as many times as it takes.
However, individual candidates who may have received a copy of your data or canvassed you might not get the notice. Eventually their copies of your data might get leaked. You have no control over this and no recourse. I know this from personal experience. Through a unique mixup with a name, I have slowly watched my data go from politician to politician to now general spam. It’s not coming from data brokers because the only place the mixup happened was with political data.
Best of all, the FTC doesn’t give a shit. If someone “manually” sends you a political text, it doesn’t require prior consent. The “manual” setup for this is a bunch of VoIP shit that doesn’t actually go back to a real human ever and is about as “manual” as the fully automated assembly lines from How It’s Made where a human is standing nearby with a clip board saying “yup that’s a widget.”
Got 9 in one day. If they include a name it’s never mineUse their numbers to sign up for stuff
Omg this is essentially me too. I just waited to lose my patience until this White Guys incident.
What the fuck… how can people in the US live with something like that? And how does this not massively hurt her chances?!
Most don’t get that many. OP is likely targeted in the systems. My guess is that he votes often in the primaries and has shown interest elsewhere, like by signing up for communications or donating to or volunteering for campaigns.
I just checked my spam and I’ve received four political texts in July.
Is that actually official campaign stuff?
At least some of that looks like spam designed to get “donations” that they just keep. Saw plenty of that around COVID.
The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.
But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.
how can people in the US live with something like that?
We’ve had a number of deeply corrupt individuals in charge of our federal department means to police this sort of thing.
And how does this not massively hurt her chances?!
Even odds are that it’s meant to.
Sounds legit.
/s
till
emails
Mildly infuriating, indeed.
Reminds me how I didn’t know that ’til and till are both words until way too recently
My wife gets a ton of political texts intended for me. Best I can tell is because her cell phone number is under my name with T-Mobile. (Used to be a Sprint account before the merger) I’ve never used her number to sign up for anything under my name. So it would seem either Sprint sold it or an employee leaked it or something.
I have a Google voice number and pretty much don’t get political texts. The Google voice number rings a T-Mobile prepaid phone, that number doesn’t get political texts either.
Respond to nothing. Block everything.
I keep getting emails from some republican Colorado group and I don’t even live in the US!
I have definitely seen an uptick in these over the last two weeks. Multiple times a day, some calls, too. I was involved in some activism 10-15 years ago so I accept it (still baloney tho). It has started on my work phone as well…
Filters are your friend. If this is a text message, there are SMS apps which can filter messages by content.
I block all unknown numbers.
Every 4 years.
First_time_?.jpeg
Remarkably, yeah. I always get a little political text spam, but since early ’24 it’s been harassment.
Seems more like…Harrissment
