US politics are so wild that it's really hard for me to distingish satire from reality.
This isn't how the democrats reach out. This is an info op.
I think that Eric Mayefsky with the National Democratic Training Committee PAC might actually think he is helping with this campaign. He's was one of those Tech Company CEO wannabes with a PhD in Economics who "made the move from private to political career", but he is really shitting the bed if he thinks things like this will make us want to vote Blue. I wouldn't work with the institution that gave him his degree.
No, I mean I have the Dems in my messages daily at this point. I'm on somebody's list of undecided voters. And this isn't how they do it. This is bait that's been put out to take advantage of the people that are told they're either Biden or Trump supporters on social media. Someone (I wonder who it could possibly be?) wants to entrench the divide between progressives/leftists and liberals. It's a literal information operation, not a genuine voter outreach attempt.
For the last few years, I just reply to everything with some raunchy furry porn, whatever I have on-hand on my phone, followed by 'stop'. Most are just automated, but now and again an actual person will reply, and it brings me joy. You didn't ask for gay furry bondage porn, I didn't ask to be bothered. An eye for an eye and all that...
You didn’t ask for gay furry bondage porn
The manual replier be like
By responding, regardless of what you say... you've given them information that you exist as a human.
Yeah, even texting STOP is still giving them what they want - they included that to trick people who would otherwise ignore it into verifying their existence.
I've probably blocked 100 numbers by now.
Numbers can be (and VERY often are) spoofed. You might be hit up from some bot in India or something; get annoyed and block the number; and succeed in blocking some grandma in Ohio who has no idea her number was even used for that call.
It's basically a heavily abused version of an office building with lots of specialty areas that each have their own actual phone number that can be called directly; but when they call out, your caller ID just shows the main line for that building, which prevents random people from calling back directly to that office.
Moral of the story: blocking spammers doesn't do shit.
When they call, just let it ring and go to voice mail then ignore the voice mail, and don't send any kind of response to their texts.
Your best option is to support the possibility that yours is an old number that's no longer in use and thus not worthy of even a bot's attention.
That is fun for the person who just had their phone number spoofed by the people who sent the spam, and now received furry porn from some random idiot.
Well that's definitely not some scam. What's the betting that the URL asks you for a load of personal information to confirm your identity.
Me: [receiving an obvious identity theft SMS] is this Blue MAGA?
Nobody should respond to that. It's the senders data set that's being polluted, not the receivers.
Whatever party this is by, this might just annoy people so that they won't want into either category, thus becoming a non-voter – which benefits nobody.
This should be illegal, >99% of people hate getting such messages unsolicited (the rest are the ones sending them). However, "rule of law" is a joke in several ways in this two-party system.
This is definitely not a legitimate message. The site doesn't exist and the Democrats don't send messages like that. The closest they get is linking a headline of Trump doing something stupid and saying "donate now to stop Trump."
I meant "party" as in "entity", not neccessarily DEM or GOP. The only thing this text would achieve is to annoy people. If it's not in fact a mass-sent message, it definitely fooled me but it still illustrates my main point as a caricature.
The site doesn't exist
Maybe not now (not clicking that) but for the record, archive.org does have entries for training-dems.us (with no known subpages) and the main page, as of May 15, redirects to traindemocrats.org, possibly without their consent. No idea if either of these is officially affiliated with a US political party, or if they were set up as this screenshot started circulating.
I think sending people phishing links is illegal....
I think they are skirting it. Visiting the site and interacting with it the intended way will DEFINITELY put one's personal information into someone's hands but the question is, are they doing so deceptively as far as US law is concerned? Depends on whether the sender is apparently impersonating an entoty, whether "status as a ... voter" is a reserved government phrase and whether this qualifies as election misinformation. I'd guess probably not for all, so this text may very well be legal. And if the FTC/FTC cared enough, unsolicited political/commercial texts would have all been illegal regardless of any further malicious intent.
Being a non-voter has always benefited Republicans over the last few decades.
This is why campaigns to suppress and reduce the voting population or the ability for people to vote are so effective for republicans. When you reduce the number of voters Republicans win, there is a bias towards Republicans being more willing to go out and vote and Democrats being less willing to.
Imagine if those were the polls that show Biden behind.
Text polling, with a simple one-option-or-the-other answer, would actually be a lot more accurate than the way they do the polls in reality, I think.
I'm not saying that the polls are necessarily biased either for or against Biden, just that the methodology is so laughably poor that the polls don't particularly mean anything. I dug into this at some length a few days ago and found that for a handful of recent randomly selected elections, the polls were off by an average of 16 percentage points.
Why censor the link? Perhaps I would like to provide feedback. Purely constructive criticism mind you.
Here's the URL. I blurred out an identifier part of the URL.
https://training-dems.us/poll-may-16-2
Edit: tracked the domain, registered to one Eric Mayefsky, bruh who is 'building apps for the left'
I fed it an email address of "freegaza@gmail.com" to see what the poll questions were... this one is telling:
Anyone catch what's missing?
"The economy"?
"Inflation"?
"Wars in Gaza or Ukraine"?
Whoever put this together has fucked up priorities.
They're not real polls I used to give a lot to Dems, so I still get a shit of spam from them.
One time it actually just looked like a legit poll they wanted his likely voters to take...
It was three bullshit questions, and one of them was how bad trump is. Then it took me to a donation page with $100 default and a big countdown clock. I wanted to see what would happen so I waited the two minutes. The countdown started again, it was a loop.
No way to submit survey unless you donated too. So even if they cared about results it was only if you gave and likely to be rated by how much you gave.
Both parties are obsessed with donations because that's a nice lifestyle when your job is getting the donations. And that's all it takes these days to get senior leadership positions in the DNC or Biden campaign, just bring in as much money possible.
That means more of this bullshit, that probably turns off more potential donors than anything.
https://train-dems.us resolves to https://traindemocrats.org
“Paid for by the National Democratic Training Committee PAC”
edit: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/person/54951-76P
“Eric has a PhD in Economics from Stanford and worked on Facebook's ad auctions for over 3 years. He's currently working on a behavioral finance startup.”
“behavioral finance” code word for psychological manipulation using money, typical Blue MAGA
edit 2: someone else had claimed to have verified that the whois for both urls matched, but I did not double check. After double-checking, in actuality, they do not match - train-dems goes to the Amazon Registrar wheres traindemocrats goes to the Cloudflare Registrar.
It is not likely that a website operator would utilize two different registrars like that, so this is instead a likely case of outside interference.
Blue MAGA should be ashamed of using the UN UDHR as a checklist for a platform instead of practicing Human Rights and ratifying ICESCR.
And Mr Eric Mayefsky, apologies, and I just hope that you will not be practicing any dark patterns of psychology.
“behavioral finance” code word for psychological manipulation
Funnily enough that’s exactly how I interpret “former monetisation manager at Meta” as well.
brb gonna send them some porn to make sure they don't accidentally "count my vote"
@return2ozma@lemmy.world Question for you
What do you mean by "blue MAGA"? I mean I know it's the Democrats, but why that term specifically?
spoiler
sdfsaf
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