Joanna Stern figured that, to stop all the political text messages she's been getting lately as Election 2024 heads into its final days, she simply had to reply "Stop" to those texts, as is standard protocol. But "in the game of political texts, 'Stop' apparently means 'Go! Go! Go!,'" Stern writes for the Wall Street Journal, detailing how she was inundated with dozens of additional texts after she tried to opt out of getting them. A political texting expert tells her that "unscrupulous texting vendors" have flipped the script on things, "perversely" using your request to stop the messages "as a data point, that 'Oh, we found a live number!'" And so that left Stern on her own to figure out how to get out from under the "text-pocalypse" that descended upon her—which she finally did, after some effort.
Stern first recommends that you don't "show signs of life" by replying at all to the texts you may get, as it seemed in her case to trigger even more. One theory is that the service provider(s) running the campaign texts simply gave her number to other political groups after blocking the ones that sent the original texts; another is that the PACs she initially blocked were the ones who shared her number. She suggests other stopgaps to slow the barrage—sending the unwanted texts to your junk or spam folder, blocking the offending numbers, even paying for a text spam filter (she found one for $10 a year). Ultimately, though, "it all feels like a giant game of Whac-a-Mole," she writes. "Here's hoping that by the next election cycle, we'll have stronger consumer protections and smarter tech tools," especially on our smartphones. Read her piece in full here. (More text messages stories.)
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