The best part is that fully half of these are addressed to my mom…
A text message app with a keyword blocking feature is very useful to have
LPT, use another number for dmv and voting stuff cause that’s how you get all the annoying calls and spam
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. 😠
damn is that why I get so much spam and my number keeps getting spoofed by scammers?
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.
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).
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.
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
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. 🤦🏻♂️
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.
“My Life is an Onion Article” is now on the short list of titles for my autobiography.
Man the USA sounds like it’s just three corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a country.
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.
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.
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.
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!!”
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
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!
Where’s my representation for square cut pizza?!
Hmmm. Do pineapple and anchovies go together?
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’.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 can still see the middle name, mabye increase the brush size next time?
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.
I recently moved from Texas to New Mexico, so now I get them for both states. Thankfully, my spam filter works pretty well.
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.
Anytime I want to use public WiFi that’s behind a captive portal that requires an email, I give them “[email protected]”
Jenny?
867-5309
867-5309
lol, and here it thought it was just a clever name for some fake phone number generator.
🤦
I like giving them the number 719-266-2837
I encourage folks to give it a try
What is that from?
Somebody made it to demo Twilio and it’s been running for at least ten years.
Really handy for testing telephony connections.
I just delete and report junk
