What to Do With Unwanted Political Spam Texts

From Apple’s own documentation for the “Delete and Report Junk” feature in Messages:

The sender’s information and the message are sent to Apple, and the message is permanently deleted from your iPhone.

If you accidentally report and delete messages, you can recover them.

Reporting junk or spam doesn’t prevent the sender from sending messages, but you can block the number to stop receiving them.

Via Andrew Leahey, responding to Marco Arment on Mastodon.

I’ve been inundated with spam text messages from Democratic political campaigns and PACs for the last year. I know why: because in the past, my wife and I have both contributed to Democratic political campaigns. I add my wife here, because for whatever reason, a good chunk of the political text message spam I get is addressed to “Amy”, not me, and the opposite is true for her. But: every time I have ever contributed money to a political campaign — or to any charity — I pay close attention to any checkboxes allowing me to “opt out” of any further marketing communications. That doesn’t seem to matter. Stores and charities are pretty bad at honoring this, but political campaigns are the absolute worst.

For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.

About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.

Two other observations:

  • 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. Apple should have let carrier-based messaging wither on the vine.

  • Almost every single text message this year sent to my personal phone number that I’d describe as “spam” was an attempt to get to me to contribute to a political campaign. I get random phishing texts sent to the public phone number I use for Signal and WhatsApp (which I encourage you to use to contact me, if you prefer, instead of email), but that’s to be expected, and those don’t come to Messages. It doesn’t feel like merely a minor inconvenience for having contributed to U.S. political campaigns in the past — it feels like punishment. Like anyone who gives to a political campaign is a sucker. It’s absolutely infuriating. I care deeply about U.S. politics, particularly in this ongoing Trump era, but these spam text messages absolutely have made me less willing to contribute money to campaigns and causes I believe in. Political consultants may well have analytics that show that these spams-to-people-who’ve-previously-donated-money-to-our-side “work”, but for me — and many of my friends — it has had the opposite effect. I’ve contributed significantly less money this year than in 2020 — and I now avoid ever donating small amounts to down-ballot campaigns — and the one and only reason why is that I’m annoyed that my previous contributions directly led Democratic campaigns and PACs to send me a zillion spam texts. Not only have I never, in my life, given a penny to any group whom I feel is spamming me, but this has made me gun-shy about contributing any money at all. I’ll never ever give out my actual phone number or email address to any political campaign ever again. They clearly have no respect for my time and attention. I think they’ve talked themselves into thinking this strategy “works” because it works for some of the previous donors they spam with new solicitations, but their analytics won’t show the people like me who just stop or greatly decrease their contributions without clicking any of their links. I suppose their analytics can count the “STOP” responses I’ve started sending, but I doubt they can correlate those “STOP”s with my drop-off in contributions.

★ Wednesday, 28 August 2024