Political text messages have become an increasingly popular method for candidates and their supporters to reach out to voters, particularly during election season.
The reason why politicians have turned to text messages is that their other options for communicating with voters are drying up. People have become immune to TV ads, Facebook’s changes have made it difficult to spread political messages, and even political robocalls were down by a head-turning 57% from 2021 to 2022.
Political text messages, however, are trending in the opposite direction. As we noted in our 2022 political message report, they rocketed up to 15 billion in 2022 — a 158% increase from 2021. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also reported that in 2022, political texts comprised the largest group of text message complaints.
It’s clear that candidates from all sides are turning to text messages to get voters’ attention, and the practice is becoming more and more common. It’s important to note, however, that these kinds of political messages are not the same as political phone scams run by imposters posing as members of a political campaign.
In this post, we’ll show you what these texts look like, explain how campaigns are sending them to the masses, and teach you how to stop political texts from flooding your inbox.
Political text messages have become an increasingly popular tool used by political campaigns to reach voters in recent years. These messages are typically sent via SMS to large numbers of individuals at once, often intending to solicit donations, encourage voting, or announce political events.
The use of political text messages is not new, as it has been employed by candidates from both major political parties in the United States for years. For example, Barack Obama announced his vice-presidential pick, Senator Joe Biden, through a text message to his supporters almost 15 years ago. Similarly, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump utilized text messaging for fundraising and voter mobilization in the 2016 presidential election.
This increase in political text messages has led to concerns over privacy and personal data, as some campaigns have been found to mass-text seemingly random individuals who did not opt-in to receive these messages.
Since political text messaging is a unique form of communication, it comes with its own set of rules and regulations. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has established guidelines to ensure that political text messages are sent responsibly and respectfully. Political campaigns can send text messages without prior consent, but they must be manually sent and not use auto-dialing technology. Additionally, campaigns must provide recipients with a way to opt-out of receiving future messages.
Despite these regulations, most individuals find political text messages to be an intrusion on their personal privacy. Between unsolicited candidate information and blasting voters through “peer-to-peer” texting (we’ll talk more about this below), candidates still send out campaign messages without recipients’ permission — and sometimes without even knowing which political party a person is registered with.
Political campaigns have found a new way to reach voters through peer-to-peer (P2P) texting, rapidly becoming a major source of frustration for many Americans. This tactic allows campaigns to manually send text messages to thousands of individuals, manage conversations, and respond to replies without violating FCC regulations.
According to the FCC, campaigns are only allowed to send robocalls to people who have given prior consent to be contacted, and robotexts are subject to the same rules. However, campaigns are allowed to send political text messages without the recipient’s prior consent if they send them manually, without the help of auto-dialing technology.
While it may seem like a harmless way to engage voters, campaigns purchase extensive lists of voter data, including phone numbers, from political groups and upload them into P2P texting platforms. As a result, politicians supercharge their ability to blast out text messages to unsuspecting people.
According to CallHub, a company that creates political robocalls, peer-to-peer texting, and text broadcasting software for campaigns:
“Peer-to-peer texting lets organizations send text messages to people with the help of agents. The campaign manager uploads the contact list and assigns a batch of contacts to each agent, who then reaches out and engages people in one-to-one conversations. Each agent can send out around 1500 texts in the span of an hour…”
At 1,500 texts per hour, just seven agents (such as campaign staff and volunteers) can text more than 31,000 people in three hours. CallHub goes on to say:
“Since agents are manually hitting the send button for every text, with texts going out from a ten-digit number, p2p texting stays compliant [with] texting regulations.”
This means that peer-to-peer texting platforms bypass regulations by using agents to send each text. Ultimately, this also means that political texts can come from a large number of agents, making it difficult for individuals to identify and block specific numbers and effectively stop political text messages. As a result, it’s crucial to explore other options for managing political text messages.
While the government may not provide a proper solution to stop political text messages, individuals can take matters into their own hands to prevent political spam through SMS filtering.
To do so, you can either:
However, the most effective solution to stop unwanted political text messages is through text message filtering, specifically political SMS filtering. During election seasons, some services provide political SMS filtering, which blocks text messages based on their content and not just the number that sends them. This approach ensures that all spammy political text messages are filtered out and do not waste your time.
Robokiller offers political SMS filtering that blocks all text messages that match our known spam criteria, no matter what phone number they came from. The only exception to this rule are text messages sent by your contacts, which will always get through.
To enable SMS filtering in Robokiller, follow these steps (pictured below):
SMS Spam Filtering is available for iPhone and Android.
Asking whether the government can protect people from being flooded with political texts is a valid question, but it’s unlikely that a comprehensive solution will come anytime soon. This leaves many people in a frustrating position when it comes to combating political messages. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) created the Do Not Call registry to protect consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls, it unfortunately does not cover political calls and texts. So, even if you register your number, you may still receive political text messages.
Furthermore, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) only regulates automated and prerecorded calls and text messages, which excludes peer-to-peer texting campaigns. Since these campaigns utilize human agents instead of automated technology to send mass texts, they are legally allowed to send messages without the recipient’s prior consent. This creates a loophole that political campaigns have been able to exploit, resulting in a flood of political text messages to individuals’ phones.
The best way to avoid political text messages and other unwanted messages is to use advanced SMS filtering like you get with Robokiller. Our SMS filtering keeps your text message inbox free of unwanted political spam.
