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

  • wander1236
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    226 months ago

    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.

    • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      46 months ago

      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

  • Altima NEO
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    36 months ago

    I keep getting these too, but I’m in a solidly blue state

    • @AquaTofana@lemmy.world
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      26 months ago

      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

  • Admiral Patrick
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    1326 months ago

    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. 😠

    • Ricky Rigatoni
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      506 months ago

      The invention of smartphones and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        6 months ago

        Hard agree!

        I downgraded to a pseudo dumb phone a few months ago, and it’s been life changing in all the best ways.

        • @adarza@lemmy.ca
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          46 months ago

          i don’t even do sms on my ‘dumb’ phone.

          when the phone makes a noise, it’s either low on battery (or, if it was plugged-in, fully charged), an alarm or timer i set, or a very high probability of being a legit call (the carrier has reasonably-effective blockers for spam, bots and spoofed origin calls).

          • Admiral Patrick
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            66 months ago

            Totally respect that.

            I tried a month of dumbphone but realized there was a minimum of “smart” I needed in a daily driving device. My compromise was a low-end smartphone in a flip phone form factor which is just smart enough for what I need.

        • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          26 months ago

          Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it

      • Admiral Patrick
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        316 months ago

        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. 🤦🏻‍♂️

        • @pdxfed@lemmy.world
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          276 months ago

          At this point it’s like the Onion article that they release after every school shooting about how nothing can be done to prevent it in the only country where it occurs regularly; the data raping and pillaging that goes on in the US despite other countries having passed basic common sense privacy and control laws…well too bad you can’t afford the lobbyists to pass it, Poor.

          • Cruxifux
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            116 months ago

            Man the USA sounds like it’s just three corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a country.

          • Admiral Patrick
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            96 months ago

            “My Life is an Onion Article” is now on the short list of titles for my autobiography.

  • @bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    96 months ago

    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.

    • Electric
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      96 months ago

      Gavin Newsom’s discord server

      What is this timeline.

      • @bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        36 months ago

        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!!”

    • @TurtleTourParty@midwest.social
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      26 months ago

      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.

    • @ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      16 months ago

      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.

      • @officermike@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

  • @potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish
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    46 months ago

    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.

    • @tburkhol@lemmy.world
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      46 months ago

      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.

  • @werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    36 months ago

    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!"

  • @Concave1142@lemmy.world
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    336 months ago

    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.

  • @Hackworth@lemmy.world
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    76 months ago

    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.

    • @PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world
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      46 months ago

      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.

      • @ahal@lemmy.ca
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        16 months ago

        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.

    • @ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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      406 months ago

      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.

      • @Visstix@lemmy.world
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        126 months ago

        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.

        • Jay
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          96 months ago

          I’m not sure how many OP gets in a week but I get so. many. of these stupid messages. It’s usually about 3-6 a week. It pisses me off every time I get them. Luckily I have a message filter set up with just bare bones rules to filter out anything that contains “Trump” and “President” and that’s been working great. But the fact that I even get those messages is absurd to me. I’ve blocked at the bare minimum, probably about 300 of those numbers so far. It only keeps rising every week when I decide to look through my junk SMS

          • @Visstix@lemmy.world
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            46 months ago

            That’s insane. The only message we get here is per mail, with information on where to vote and your voting card thingy. There might be some people near stores giving out flyers with information about their party, that’s about it.

            • Jay
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              16 months ago

              I wish it were the case for us here too. I appear to be the main one in my family who gets it and sometimes it has a name attached that isn’t mine so it’s possible it’s from the previous owner of the phone number. But it’s still infuriating nevertheless that it exists in the first place. Just wish there was a “Don’t ever message me again under any other number” option.

  • BoofStroke
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    26 months ago

    I forward it all to 7726, reply stop, then block it. It’s still friggin whack a mole though.

  • /home/pineapplelover
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    26 months ago

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