What to Do With Unwanted Political Spam Texts
For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.
About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.
It works in the sense that I don’t get any more from that number, but I do get more from other numbers about the same topic.
It’s crazy that I have to open a message, block the sender, then delete and report junk. The delete part often doesn’t show up so I have to report the junk message and then delete. This is multiple times a day. Such a great use of my time.
Update (2024-09-12): Tim Johnsen:
Should’ve done this ages ago #shortcuts #automation
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I came across https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/junkman-a-i-sms-spam-blocker/id1591815272
I also paid for a years database subscription
I ended up deleting it.
It was overly sensitive.
Might it work for your use case?
When I send STOP as the first reply to an initial text, I will sometimes (but not always) get a notification from my carrier (Verizon) that they're now automatically blocking messages from that number. There's definitely at least *some* stuff carriers can do when they detect this.
The STOP message is supported by all legitimate mass-mailing servers. But it is local to that one server, not to the millions of others that are sending spam.
The "report" link Apple provides simply forwards the message to your cellular provider. They may or may not do anything about it.
But a provider won't do anything unless the messages are illegal. And (at least in the US), the lawmakers writing the anti-spam laws created a carve-out for themselves. Spam is only illegal if it is commercial, so there's nothing restricting spam from political campaigns, pollsters and advocacy groups.
And, of course, unethical/criminal organizations just ignore the laws and the STOP requests because they know nobody is going to bother prosecuting them or even figuring out who they really are.
The one amusing thing is that some (sadly, not all) servers will unsubscribe you if you reply with an F-bomb. (I'll give you one guess about how I figured that out.)
