I started this note as a response to a trending diary complaining about campaign spam, but given the popularity of the currently trending diary I thought it might be useful to post as a diary instead.
I agree with diary author Laurence Lewis that this that behavior is incredibly annoying. I hate it and I want it to stop. However it’s proven quite effective for the campaigns overall despite the risk of annoying voters, so they are never going to stop. Venting on Dailykos won’t bring about change. And I guess I don’t want them to stop if it puts them at a disadvantage to the other side’s campaigns. Back in 2020 the fear of a 2nd Trump administration motivated me to donate far too much of my disposable income to dozens of campaigns and groups, leaving me with an overwhelming amount of campaign spam and calls.
Personally, I am happy to report its a problem I have pretty much completely solved — here’s what worked:
1. ActBlue is great. Don’t blame them. They are collecting legally required information for compliance (remember all those campaign finance reforms this community generally supports? This is how they ensure compliance with the law). Don’t stop using ActBlue. And yes, they take a small fee for running the site, but it’s reasonable and almost every Dem campaign is happy to have the 96.05% of donations they collect — just like almost every business does better by accepting credit cards to generate more sales despite a similar cost in processing fees. Republicans would love to have an equivalent site — WinRed is much more predatory than ActBlue and has been a real problem for them.
2. STOPPING EMAIL SPAM:
The key is to never list an email account that you care about or your cell phone number there. Get a free email account. I use Yahoo for this as my account from the early naughts is overrun with spam anyway. If you want privacy ProtonMail is excellent and offers free accounts which more than cover this usage. Give out only this email to every campaign that requires it, and don’t ever use it for anything personal. When I do get email spam from legitimate organizations or campaigns I unsubscribe and that particular group always does stop (though after my info lands on databases which are bought and sold other groups pick it up, so it takes a long time to fully clear).
3. STOPPING TEXTS
NEVER give your cell phone number out to ActBlue, or any political campaign or even any charity. I have a MagicJack phone number I use which costs me a grand total of $20/year. It’s a VOIP line, but I don’t have it hooked up anywhere or use it for outgoing calls, so it functions as a messaging service which sends me an email whenever I get a call with the message as an audio attachment. I pair this with a free transcription service which emails me the transcripts. If I ever want to check my spam messages, instead of having to listen to them I can just quickly read the email transcripts. When I make a donation of any kind to any group I use only this number.
Data harvesting is a huge (kind of terrifying when I stop and think about it sometimes) business and spammers, scammers, and sometimes political campaigns will still sometimes get access to your cell phone. For this I’ve installed the Robokiller app on my cell phone which does an excellent job of blocking spam calls and texts. It’s currently catching 100% of political campaign fundraising texts and keeping them for me in a junk folder so I never see them unless I want to. The funny thing about my political text spam is that it’s about equal between Republican spam and Democratic (kind of sad that it’s all the same language on both sides designed to terrify us into giving $. Dems are much better on policy but barely better on fundraising sleaze). I suspect a fair bit of my text solicitations are also fraud which never goes to any political campaign.
The above method has worked so well for me, I’ve expanded it to all of my online shopping. If I’m expecting a call about a delivery or something important I can always check the email transcript, but it doesn’t interfere with my other communications.
Hope this is helpful and my experience can save some other folks the aggravation.