Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.
Switched to this from Apple a year and a half ago. Works for most things. Unexpectedly, replacement apps lack polish. Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault. There may be workarounds, but I haven't had the energy to try the more complicated suggestions.
I am probably going to switch back to a used old iPhone for "phone appliance" tasks, but keep around the Pixel for other things.
My main takeaway from the experience is that iMessage is an even bigger weapon than I thought.
Are you in the US? I get the impression that iMessage and RCS are only big there. Almost nobody uses them here in Europe. (It's mostly WhatsApp where I live and Signal is slowly getting more popular.)
As an aside, from the latest release notes: Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add toggle for granting Play services access to ICC auth in order to support RCS with carriers requiring it for RCS in Google Messages including T-Mobile (see RCS usage guide)
The RCS issue is why I switched back to iPhone, reluctantly.
If anything, iOS seems buggier and less reliable, but I know (and am related to) a lot of people who insist on using iMessage/RCS, and I can't be missing messages.
It is possible for a devoted individual to do this, but it is not possible to solve deep societal problems one devoted individual at a time. We still need massive regulation of addiction-based business models.
TikTok (along with the other platforms) is more like cigarettes, or sugar.
It's highly addictive. The negative effects are somewhat diffuse and may take a while to really impact your life, but they're very real.
And, rather importantly, it's legal and widely available, and the industry behind them is suppressing evidence of their harms and making tons of money off of addiction.
Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?
(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
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