In my experience it doesn't do much. For example, I made the mistake of contributing to the campaign of a politician. Now I get texts from candidates all over the country. If I reply STOP to one, I just get sent more texts from another number, for another candidate in another state. I just got tired of replying with STOP after the 20th time. This just guarantees I'm never giving any money to any candidate ever again.
In a previous election cycle, I made the mistake of donating a few thousand dollars to several candidates. Since then, I get spammed through the year, and close to a major election, it's dozens of emails and phone calls and text messages every week.
Thankfully, Gmail catches 99% of the spam emails and my Pixel phone filters out spam texts and calls. It has a built-in Google Assistant mode that screens unknown callers with a robot voice picking up and asking them to describe what they're calling about. Most of the callers just hang up as soon as they hear that, and if they don't and actually say they're calling about so-and-so candidate, I just click the block button.
I tried to switch to iPhone for a few weeks (for iMessage), but the spam problem was SO bad (even with Robocaller and some SMS spam filtering app) that I switched back to Android. Google's spam blocking is phenomenal on the Pixel, but they barely even advertise it. It's an afterthought for them, but a lifesaver for me. My phone would be completely unusable without it.
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In the back of my mind, I keep thinking it'd be cool to have an app that automatically looks up whoever the candidate is running against and automatically donating 10 cents (or however much) to their opponent every time they spam you. "Hi, it sounds like you're running in District _____ against ______. Because of this spam, I've donated 10 cents to your opponent. So far, this app has donated $1,234 to your opponent because of your messages. Goodbye!"
Our government is so corrupt and broken they're never going to fix any of this, so it's up to the technologists and market incentives instead...
I thought about telling everyone to vote against whoever spams (phone/sms/email/mail/etc) the most. Chances are that whoever is funding the spam is expecting for a return on their investment to convince me to vote in a manner that is more beneficial to them than it is to me.
The problem is that once they identify you as voting against spammers it encourages them to false flag spam you from a PAC that looks like it supports their opposition.
The people who run campaigns are hired guns and they just collect lists.
A relative won an award from an organization a decade ago, the consultants just steal or otherwise retain the mailing lists and use them forever. I get pitches from many NYC council candidates from that one dinner
>Google's spam blocking is phenomenal on the Pixel, but they barely even advertise it.
It's a feature that's good enough to warrant me replacing the otherwise superior Xiaomi dialer/SMS apps on my phone with the Google ones. I don't get the screen calling, but all the other parts work 80% of the time.
I gave a few small donations and foolishly didn’t use a disposable email address. That was over four years ago and I’m still getting over a dozen spam emails a day from candidates I have never even heard of.
Maybe there is some central actblue list I can opt out of but I don’t even think I created an account with them
I'm fairly convinced that it's not a ton of different groups responsible for the bulk of messages I get, but one or two groups cycling through new names every few days
If I don't reply "stop" to anything, it seems like one day "Retired Democrats PAC" will suddenly stop sending me messages and "Save Democracy PAC" will suddenly begin, and that pattern is what makes me think a single group is behind a lot of it.
If I do reply "stop" to one, of course they will stop from that PAC, but a few days later another one will always pop up and pick right back up.
Every few days I send out a mass "stop" to all of the numbers I've gotten messaged by, and it usually gives me 3-4 days of peace.
Your campaign donations are a matter of public record and Actblue harvests them and repackages them to sell to political campaigns and operatives. It's a shitty business model that preys upon an unfortunate part of federal law that most donors don't know about.
Your donation records to the fec are explicitly not allowed to be used for donors mining like this. I'm sure it still happens, but it's not the majority.
What happens is that the campaign you donate to to puts you on their list (allowed) and then shares that list with others in the party (also allowed). They share back and forth so fast you can't get out of it.
This is why it's the email that's shared not the name. FEC records don't have your email attached to to them, but the spam still follows unique emails like "candidate@customdomain.com".
It's not just the re-use and sharing of lists, but also the incredible Facebook-style targeting available to anyone for spamming. Anyone can sign up for something like ActionNetwork.org or NationBuilder and send out an email blast to registered voters in a particular zip code. NGP VAN is even more powerful.
The whole industry is mature and super targeted like any other spammer, but mostly immune to spam regulations (because politics are specifically exempt from CAN-SPAM etc., and most voter registration and donation data is public record). The whole pipeline is thoroughly automated and you're marketed and remarketed to just like you are with Google or Amazon, but without any of the already-minimal consumer and privacy protections.
Their targetting is shit. The people selling the targetting capability are scamming everybody else. I get countless spam messages from both political parties, both seemingly certain that I support them. I never donated to any of them.
If the price of living in a democratic society with transparent voter/donor records is a few annoying emails, we should all be paying that price gladly.
I dunno if that's either necessary or sufficient... in a country with legalized bribery, billionaire presidents, SuperPACs and all sorts of dark money, I doubt that knowing Joe Citizen donated $27 is really going to save democracy.
I donated $20 in 2016 and have regretted it ever since.
In the 2020 election cycle it seemed some of the texts had people behind them, so I’d reply and told them if they kept texting me I’d vote for the opponent out of pure spite. That was actually quite effective, but did have to say it to a half dozen people.
This time around, I keep getting texts asking for $40. Most I report as spam, others I say stop. But it seems these lists are distributed out far and wide, so removing the name from one, or 10, doesn’t do much.
Like you, I will never again donate to a politician and will encourage everyone else to save their money. No one should pay money to be harassed. I’m not sure how they think this is a good idea or will win people over.
> In the 2020 election cycle it seemed some of the texts had people behind them, so I’d reply and told them if they kept texting me I’d vote for the opponent out of pure spite. That was actually quite effective, but did have to say it to a half dozen people.
I tried sending Goatse back to them, but whatever text spamming software they're instructed to use doesn't support receiving images, unfortunately :)
I've been interested in donating before, but this is actually the main thing holding me back. I get so little spam and unwanted messages (email and text), and I am trying extremely hard to keep it that way.
Use a email alias service like simple login, duck duck go’s private duck address etc
You can disable that email alias and never receive emails sent to that address again
It’s not worth it. Politicians have shown they can’t be trusted with our contact info. No one should be jumping through hoops to hide their identity to donate money.
Maybe if donations go to 0 they’ll finally get the message that citizens don’t want to be harassed for donations.
This is in no way enough to prevent election spam.
You have to give your name and address as a public record, and they will likely find your phone number and email and will call, text, and spam you from there.
One of the blessings of having a loved one in politics is that I know who is/isn't selling their lists. There's only a small handful of organizations who adhere to a firm "no list buying, no list selling" policy. Whoever you donated to apparently has dreadful data ethics. Once your number is in a major political/nonprofit consultancy's database, they'll happily hand it out to all of their other clients. You have to trust that the campaign you support isn't going to give them that data... which is, of course, impossible to know from the outside.
Since they use VoIP SMS and "first name" it's pretty hard to resort to the old fashioned doxxing despite living in the golden age of data leaks.
I would suggest simply wasting their time as much as possible (I've lead on such people pretending to be naive and caused great frustration). But ideally, not to waste your own time.
I think in the near future android-local chatbots will be further along, or iphone-local, and ideally one can run the chatbot. and you can just set the chatbot to "waste this person's time" as we will have chatbots for "flirt with this potential date and schedule drinks". Of course the endpoint of such a world is chatbots all around and no humans.
For email spam: you can use your email provider’s report spam feature so more of their emails end up in spam folders and their money is wasted. You can look at the email headers to figure out which platform sent the email (like Mailgun or Sendgrid or whatever) and report the email to them, which may cause their account to be shut down and then to be banned as a business from that platform. You can use the FTC and FCC reporting websites from my other comment. You could also report each incident to your state’s authorities like your attorney general’s office, by saying you suspect potential fraudulent practices or abusive practices or violation of privacy or whatever.
Actblue requires a phone number and email address.
As far as I know, physically mailing a check is the best way to avoid sharing information as you only need to provide your name, address, and employer. This information is the only federally required information.
I don’t know. What’s weird is that I think it is up to the campaign to make sure they have valid contact information. So I suppose there is a risk that the campaign might get dinged?
That's exactly my experience, except that I used my email instead of my phone number. That one little contribution (maybe $10) caused an endless stream of spam. And of course I forgot to give them a distinct To address after emotions are stirred up after their incendiary propaganda message on the donation page.
Ha! Worked for me, too. Heck it’s a minor request from a future president ready to run a country. Next week though “Hi I am Tim. I need that $40”. Well played, I only made the deal with Kamala, after all, ;-)
I had some woman use my email (I have an OG mac.com email), when donating to her local ASPCA.
They sold it to a liberal political group, who then sold it to an extreme liberal group.
I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of spam emails, every day, with the most batshit insane messages. It’s especially bad, now, with the US election coming up. The one saving grace, is that it wasn’t a right-wing group. They make the ultra-liberals look like a bunch of teetotalers.
Since she used the iCloud.com variant of the address, I simply nuke all emails that specify that, as a destination. Apple won’t let me block the domain, so I have to apply the rules, after they fill my inbox.
Sometime in there, one of the spammers figured out that icloud.com will also receive iMessage texts, so they have started coming to that, as well (so far, it is from legit political groups. I don’t expect that to last). I delete and report as junk. I very rarely respond with STOP.
