Nathan Pilkenton complains about a flood of political spam texts from Texas campaigns after moving out of state, and explains why he is hesitant to simply reply STOP to unsubscribe.
Summary: I complain about spam texts and consider why I’m so hesitant to just reply STOP to unsubscribe.
I moved out of Texas a few years ago. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like any statewide midterm candidates have heard about that. In the past month, I’ve gotten dozens of texts like this, usually multiple per day:
Some of the texts I received while working on this post
They seem to be mostly from Republicans, but I’ve gotten a little bit of everything — texts from Democrats, independents, PACs, unbiased pollsters, obviously biased pollsters, even those weird false flag texts that went around. I don’t remember signing up for anything, and certainly would never have intended to, but clearly my number got on a list somehow.
This is pretty annoying, because text is my highest-signal communication channel. Most of what’s in there is from family and friends, plus the occasional 2FA code. The little red notification bubble means a lot more on Messages than other apps — which of course is exactly why politicians, marketers, and scammers want so badly to get in there.
It’s not just the elections, either — this has been getting noticeably worse over time. This year I’ve started to get a ton of these types of messages, sometimes as many as one a day:
It turns out, despite seeming all personal and handwritten, that if you reply STOP, these messages also reveal themselves to be part of a larger campaign. (Shouldn’t this be illegal, by the way?)
So it seems like the solution is to reply STOP to all of these and eventually you won’t get as many, right?
Except I haven’t done that. I don’t want to do that. Except for that “experiment” above, I have instead chosen “Delete and Report Spam” for every single one of these texts… even though it doesn’t seem to do anything.
What’s crazy to me is that Apple has actually added a Spam folder to Messages, and there are a few things in there. But even though I’ve been reporting all this stuff as spam for months, if not longer, none of the new messages I get seem to get filtered into the Spam folder.
So again, why not just reply STOP to these messages? Why am I so averse to doing that?
After some reflection, I think I figured it out: replying with STOP feels like I’m accepting this vision of the world.
If I reply STOP, I’m basically saying, “Okay, you’re allowed to send me whatever you want, and then I have to send back STOP for you to knock it off.” And I want to fundamentally reject that framing. Mass-texting and spam campaigns shouldn’t get that right by default, and the burden shouldn’t be on me to individually opt-out of every single one of these campaigns.
So if you’re reading this and you work on iOS at Apple, please help. This feels like a great use case for all this new Apple Intelligence (similar to the AI adblock experiment I ran a while back). If I report something as Spam, maybe an option could pop up to “Filter messages like this to Spam?” or something, and then the unwanted text gets added to a list of examples. So then next time I get a text from an unknown number, the LLM reads the list of spam examples, and if the new message is similar, it goes to Spam. (That’s just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are even better ideas to combat this.)
Recently, I did find a “Delete and Stop” option, which auto-sends the STOP message for me. But it seems like “Delete and Stop” and “Delete and Report Spam” are mutually exclusive. You’d think that reporting as spam would also auto-send a STOP message, but the number of texts I’ve gotten from Don Huffines despite reporting each one suggests otherwise.
Hopefully things will calm down after the election. But for goodness’ sake, somebody please do something about this. I was going to say we fixed this problem for email, but I’m not really sure we did — these days I get tons of marketing messages despite always trying to opt out on every single website whenever I purchase something. And I get multiple spam calls a day too, even though I’m on the Do Not Call registry. So maybe we’re just doomed to be eternally pestered by whoever wants our money or our vote. Here’s hoping they don’t figure out how to get into my Slack. ⧈
