Ban Political Text Messages

I hate electoral season with great passion. It’s bad enough to be inundated with commercials when you are trying to watch something entertaining. But the text message blitz? I just hate everyone in politics right now. Literally everyone hates these.

She is hardly alone. In October, people in the United States received an estimated 1.29 billion political text messages — about twice as many as in April — according to RoboKiller, an app that blocks Robocalls and spam texts. Many voters have complaints about it.In response to recent questions from The New York Times, more than 940 readers across the political spectrum shared their experiences, describing a hail of inflammatory messages from both parties. To illustrate their concerns, readers also submitted more than 1,000 images of the political texts on their phones. Many were rife with divisive language or deceptive content.

The campaign messages not only capture some voters’ deep frustrations with unwanted political texts. They also document how political texting is becoming a go-to method for spreading doomsday scenarios, lies and campaign smears.In other words, texting is a handy method for political actors to quietly propagate the same kind of divisiveness and disinformation that already abounds on social media — only away from the public scrutiny of academic researchers, fact-checking groups and journalists.

If I wanted the bullshit of the cable news networks, I would just watch cable news. Really, just make this stuff illegal.