1. never signed up for anything like this,
  2. never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
  3. political texts like this come all the time, and
  4. I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • droans@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      As a Democrat, I agree.

      But I kinda want to see how deep this goes.

      WhiteDudesWhoLikeFriesInTheirMilkshakes4Harris .com

      PuertoRicansWhoAreOkayWithTacoBell4Harris .com

      BlackAnimeFansWhoAreCasualFansNotLikeThatWeirdShitLikeMyWifeIsADogFromAnotherWorld4Harris .com

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      It’s a pretty relevant distinction within American life. I’m no strategist, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The only people who think race don’t matter is people who exclusively interact within the same race.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            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.

            • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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              11 months ago

              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.

              • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                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.

                • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  11 months ago

                  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.

                • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                  11 months ago

                  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.

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      11 months ago

      Actual scambaiting is the closest thing I have to religion these days

  • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.”

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      Omg this is essentially me too. I just waited to lose my patience until this White Guys incident.

    • Korne127@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What the fuck… how can people in the US live with something like that? And how does this not massively hurt her chances?!

      • droans@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • tburkhol@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me how I didn’t know that ’til and till are both words until way too recently

  • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I keep getting emails from some republican Colorado group and I don’t even live in the US!

  • rhythmisaprancer@moist.catsweat.com
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    1 year ago

    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…

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.