One of the biggest winners of the elections: our text messages

• The 2024 election cycle was a brutal attack on our texting inboxes.

• It seems like political groups keep texting even after you say “STOP!” you replied.

• You may be worried about Tuesday’s results, but there is one silver lining: no more texting.

Are Election Day in the United States, which means that by Wednesday morning, about half the country will be miserable, and the other half elated. One man inside France betting $30 million on Trump’s victory will feel something. There is also a chance that, like 2020, our nation will wake up groggily without any results, and continue to live in panicky uncertainty for a few days.

But whatever that outcome is, one thing will unite both sides: Those awful campaign text messages will finally stop.

Over the past few months, my phone has been under constant attack from groups pleading for donations or trying to get me to click on shady-looking links. I’ve gotten the messages from both sides, even from all sides.

If you also feel bombarded with political texts, you are not alone. The CEO of a major text messaging platform said in May that he expected that There will be 50% more political texts sent on Election Day this year compared to 2022 – more than 25 billion.

The most annoying thing is that it seems impossible to get them to stop. Joanna Stern for The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how she replied “STOP” to one message and then got another hundred. She spoke to people who worked at political texting companies, and they confirmed her suspicions: Answering “STOP” may just be confirmation to these companies that your number is active.

You may no longer receive text messages from the specific group or political action committee that sent the text message you responded to, but the campaign’s text message service now knows your number is active – and can give your number to another candidate or group sales.

The result is like pulling out a gray hair: pull one out and more will pop up in its place.

What the political text lines say

The Federal Trade Commission makes rules around robocalls and robotexts: They are exempt from the federal “Do Not Call” list, but there are other rules they must follow — political messages sent by an autodialer require “the express consent of the called party.” But manually sent messages don’t require an opt-in, so that’s why you get so many messages saying, “Hello, Katie! It’s Suzie from such-and-such a candidate.”

The FTC says you can report receiving text messages you didn’t request by forwarding the messages to 7726, or “SPAM.”

(Just a moment to thank all the Android users who are going to tell me that Android is much better at filtering these spam messages than the iPhone. I see you, I acknowledge you, I respect you. Please don’t send me an email telling me to switch to Android.)

This is an election where one of the biggest issues was prices in the supermarket – a tangible pain point that Americans feel in their daily lives. But what about a different kind of pain: the pain of receiving a text and thinking it’s going to be something exciting, and then it’s just political spam? Terrible.

The good news is that I’m confident that by 2028 AI will have solved it all this

Read the original article Business insider