2mo ago

Being an already decided voter in a swing state is swell

The best part is that fully half of these are addressed to my mom…

104 comments

Did your mom also install a random sketchy app from the app store and click "Allow" when it asked to access her contacts?
Because my mom did, and I get all kinds of spam. 😠
- The invention of smartphones and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
  
  Hard agree!
  I downgraded to a pseudo dumb phone a few months ago, and it's been life changing in all the best ways.
- jfc I hope you reported that app.
  
  No idea what app it was. Mom was just like "my phone got hacked so i got a new one" and a new phone number with it. 🤦🏻‍♂️
- damn is that why I get so much spam and my number keeps getting spoofed by scammers?

Life in the US must suck so fucking bad.
- You know, I have to say you're right.
  At this point, unless you have been living under a giant rock, there are simple, hard facts you can't possibly not know about Donald Trump that should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of political leanings. It's simply impossible to ignore them.
  Therefore logic dictates that whoever votes for Trump today must agree with the Nazi stuff, the Trump Purge, shooting protesters in the legs, hanging vice-presidents or locking up former speakers of the house. I mean LITERALLY agree - because he LITERALLY said those things. Even MAGA people shouldn't agree with those things: making America great again implies not destroying America!
  Meaning roughly half of this country agrees with those things. If that's not fucked up to the n-th degree, I don't know what is.
  
  far right parties are the biggest in most european countries and it still doesn't come anywhere close to how much it must suck to live in america. Who you vote for is nobody's business, and this kind of spam is insane.
- Nah it's fine, see I don't live in a swing-state, so nobody cares about my vote at all!
- I find it kind of reassuring that at least our votes actually mean something to someone and the entire process isn't completely rigged, otherwise no one would fucking bother.
  
  That's a very low bar ><
  Also because of first past the post, most people's votes don't in fact matter. So personally I like to aim a bit higher.

And the worst part? They're allowed to ignore the national do not call registry.

I’m in Missouri and I got one from some ghoul of a Republican today. It was very off putting. I fucking hate those fascist fucks.

As annoying as it is, I reply STOP to each one and then block the number. Sometimes I get lucky and get an unsubscribe confirmation.
I hardly get spam texts because I refuse to give my number out for anything. Jenny is my go to phone number when I need to give out a burner number.
- I like giving them the number 719-266-2837
  I encourage folks to give it a try
  
  What is that from?
- Jenny?
  
  867-5309
  
  867-5309
- Anytime I want to use public WiFi that's behind a captive portal that requires an email, I give them "bezos@amazon.com"

Finally, a chance to tell Mom, Andrew, Jeremy, and Doug, that they're only important enough for a stranger on the internet to want to decipher their semi-crossed out names and nothing more!
- I see 'Audrey'.
  
  Same, the v that's visible is definitely not a w.
- The town name and state is also very easy to figure out, and you can easily verify it by checking where Musk will be holding a town hall today. For each of the most violently crossed-out words, D███ and C███████, there is just one first name matching whatever is visible. Yes, I copied and pasted letters from elsewhere and the width is correct.

I recognize those area codes! And I also get like 6 of those every day.
Did you sign Elons petition? He only asks if you support the first two amendments, which, technically, I do. I was hoping to win the million and collect it wearing all blue! 😂
- FYI, it may actually be illegal to even accept that million dollars. I am not a lawyer, and my understanding is it's kinda untested legal grounds, but there is an argument for it.
  
  Fair enough, but I think that's a risk I'd be willing to take.

Protip: don't scribble shit out in screenshots. Too easy for people to figure out what's underneath. Put filled in rectangles over whatever you don't want people to see so there's nothing that shows through. Most built in photo editors on phones have this functionality.
- Filled in rectangles are so cold and impersonal. The scribbles are organic and remind me I need to brush my hair. Who cares if someone reverse engineers OP's mom's name?

I was pleasantly surprised to see Google Messages automatically blocks most political spam now. I've only gotten a few that slipped through in the past few months.
- If my grandmother makes it to the next election I might move her to an android phone for this reason alone. Her iPhone doesn't block the spam at all, and even appears to not have a way to delete the messages

I'm so glad we don't get campaign spam like this in the UK.
- Oh man I know, right‽ In Canada the run up to the election can be between 37 and 51 days. The US election cycle is for fucking ever and then restarts 2 years after the election, and that's not counting mid terms. Just exhausting. Campaign advertising must just be a huge industry because they're never turned off.
  
  The 2024 election cycle will cost America $15 billion.
  
  from what I understand in the US when you get elected to the House or Senate, you have your regular work schedule, then the party forces you into a boiler room call centre across the street for a few hours to work the phones and hustle more cash. It really does never end.

This is why I've started blasting the fuck out of every one of them. You do enough cursing and insulting, they tend to actually stop texting and calling. I got sick of having to tell them to fucking stop the spam, which didn't work. But, amazingly, after a few days of going batshit on every one of them, they've stopped almost entirely. No texts at all in three days for me, though my wife and dad still get them.

Vote for me op
- I'm a single-issue voter. What is your plan for the psychopaths running loose and destroying our country by putting anchovies on perfectly good pizzas? This is very important.
  
  Wait until you hear about pineapple on pizza. Pineapple!
- Gonna write you in!

"I'm just gonna vote for the last person that texted me" : the demo these assholes are targeting.
- I took will vote for this dudes mom.

Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn't get filtered into spam. Here's mine from Wisconsin!

STOP

You guys need regulation about that, thank God we have some in EU
- Yes it seems like that should be the duty of a functional government... Oh wait...

I’ve lived in and was registered in 3 states in the past 4 years - currently in a swing state. Before I began blocking political texts and emails a month ago, I counted over 40 emails and over 15 texts per day, every day, plus phone calls every week.

Even though I’m an anarchist from not california, i somehow ended up in Gavin Newsom’s discord server where people regularly organize to text voters like this.
I am so fucking glad i take great care to keep my names and numbers off of these lists, and even more glad to live in a solid colored state with no hope of flipping meaning the election ads are minimal.
My poor Californian friends receive so many goddamn text messages it’s insane, and my friends from Pennsylvania and Georgia have it worse.
- Gavin Newsom’s discord server
  What is this timeline.
  
  I have no clue. But our timeline certainly isn’t the best one.
  I genuinely have no idea why i’m still in it, but I do know i was drunk as a skunk when I joined. It’s on his website iirc, but I do know I was invited by someone on discord. L
  Sometimes I join weird servers and end up staying for the memes. I’m on a tankie discord server, and while i have it muted and generally ignore it, time to time i take a peek and find some godly ultra high effort shitposts mixed in with the muck. I’m on a server for radio hacking although wireless shit is magical to me. But the memes are great even if they sometimes look like they are hieroglyphics.
  But that gavin newsom discord doesn’t have good memes. Now, many of the memes are just various “Vote!” images and bottom of the barrel facebook memes.
  Another remarkable thing about it is how many old people there are on that server who have their first and last name and their state as their username, and sometimes they even have a selfie as a profile pic.
  It’s so weird to have some servers with genuine security culture like your average anarchist or queer server, and then also have Gavin Newsom’s server with “Jane Doe [WI]” sending a facebook post she made that is just a link to a youtube vid on project 2025 followed by her saying “Shameful!!”
- California has no chance of flipping. Wonder why they have it worse than you.
- I'm not in a swing state but I still get a decent amount of political spam. It's mostly random PACs sending clickbait texts asking me to donate. Every so often I get a text from a candidate running in a completely different state and wonder where they got their lists.
- I’m so glad California lets me register as “no party preference” but I’m still allowed to participate in the primaries. It really cuts down on the spam.
  
  Florida voter here. We have closed primaries and I have a registered party affiliation. I don't receive any political texts, mostly just fake USPS scams.

mine in PA. most of them are sent to a name I don't know anyone by...
- Holy shit I didn't know I had a spam filter on my texts. Mine looks much the same.

You need to use VeroSMS or something to block all the political bs. Best thing I ever did
- This looks promising. If it works as advertised you have done me a great service! Thanks for the info.
  
  There are a couple like this and I use them. They work great. The only thing you need to be careful is sometimes they stop sms mfa codes, but it’s gotten so good that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. It’s easy to toggle on and off, and you can whitelist by different criteria if it happens to grab things it shouldn’t. Here is what my block looks like:

I got one that threatened me saying they will know if I voted or not.
It was also sent to the wrong address and someone else had to give it to me asking if I was ok when they saw the hand written threat.
It's fucking insane.

I'm getting this shit from everywhere I've ever lived. I can normally ignore my phone for the most part, but I'm actually waiting on updates about the health of a relative. And this shit needs to stop. No one's changing their mind cause of a text, guys. No one's like, "Oh yeah, is it time to vote?" Please, just stop.

I wish this was what I got. At least I could reply to these with a "fuck off" even if no one reads it. I hate the flyers I get in the mail all the time. Wasteful as fuck and no way to stop it. I've thought about collecting them all and dumping them on the doorstep of my county's Republican party office though.

I've been getting political spam for Florida for years every election cycle. Almost always for Republicans, but I did get one Harris message the other day. The catch? I've never lived in Florida and haven't even been there in over 15 years.

I ALREADY SENT MY BALLOT! YOU KNOW THIS! LEAVE ME ALONE!

"American democracy"

I have always assumed I get these due to some activist work I did 10+ years ago, but it seems particularly bad this cycle.

I've got a new mexico number and havent got more requests from random organizations for donations. Starting to think i've inherited this number from someone.
- I get political spam addressed to three different people who used to have my number. Real estate spam for one of them. Temp job offers for another. It's annoying af going on four years.

I recently moved from Texas to New Mexico, so now I get them for both states. Thankfully, my spam filter works pretty well.

I keep getting these too, but I'm in a solidly blue state
- Yeah I'm in Texas and my spam filter looks just like OPs and others who have posted in this thread.
  Im starting to think this is a general American issue and not a swing state-vs-solid state issue

I just delete and report junk

Voting is important. There were a few local proposals regarding taxes for example. There were also a ton of different representatives and judges that had to be picked locally. And of course you get to participate in the national president lottery! You pick your option, and if the electoral college picks the same option, then you win! Otherwise, if the electoral college picks a different option, then you loose. Yey! Democracy! I wish the electoral college kept calling my phone every day to tell me how important my vote for president is! It would go like this: " he loo 😂😂😂😂 lol, hold on. Yeah go vote! LOL! It means something! LOL 😆😂😆. We're picking Trump if you don't vote! We're picking Trump if you do vote! LOL your vote is very important to us, a representative will be voting with you shortly LOL!"
- Better Trump than the illegal immigrant Kamala. So my vote goes to him.
  
  She's born in Oakland, CA. Where did she illegally migrate to?
  
  User name checks out for such a confused statement.

i can still see the middle name, mabye increase the brush size next time?

LPT, use another number for dmv and voting stuff cause that's how you get all the annoying calls and spam

I forward it all to 7726, reply stop, then block it. It's still friggin whack a mole though.
- What's 7726?
  
  https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-report-spam-text-messages#report

A text message app with a keyword blocking feature is very useful to have

104 comments