PROGRESSIVE GROUPS FIGHT AT&T AND T-MOBILE’S NEW TEXTING RULES – By Rachel M. Cohen (The Intercept) / April 20 2021
Critics say the rules, known as “10DLC,” will hamper their organizing and worsen private tech overreach.
ABOUT A MONTH out from the 2020 presidential election, an app called RoboKiller published the first glimpse into how campaigns and advocacy groups were leveraging political texts and calls to shape the race. The app, designed to block automated calls and spam texts, found that after June 2020, robocalls declined, but political text messaging picked up. By the end of September, Republicans had sent 1.8 billion texts to voters, and Democrats had sent 902 million.
If you lived in a swing state, you were probably getting more than five or six texts per day from political volunteers — a level you’d never experienced in prior cycles.
The draw of text messaging as a political outreach tool is not hard to understand in an age when millions pay extra to skip TV ads and emails often go straight to the spam folder. Text message “open rates” tend to be much higher than those of email, making texting a more attractive way for campaigns to engage voters. And while businesses are required under federal law to get affirmative consent to contact individuals by text, so-called peer-to-peer messaging, or P2P, has long operated in a legal gray area. Because peer-to-peer messages are sent by individuals, though aided by applications, they have not qualified as the kind of automated mass text blasts that need opt-in consent.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2021/04/20/att-tmobile-texting-10dlc-political-campaigns/
