e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Anti-Obama Spam Texts Briefly Flood Swing States

October 31st, 2012

Here’s a quick example of how NOT to do GOTV — a Republican political “operative” (a word that always amuses me) has been flooding swing-state voters’ phones with spam texts detailing how horrible Barack Obama is (he’s in favor of the “gay agenda,” or so I’ve heard). But you thought those weren’t possible? Silly rabbit, the miscreant took advantage of the fact that phone providers typically convert an email sent to a phone number into a text message, a practice that some folks have been pushing the FEC to ban. And here we see why — this guy basically turned email spam into text spam, yum.

Friend-of-e.politics Scott Goodstein (of Revolution Messaging) has been working hard on the issue, and it’s great that he got quotes in both the Politico and Huffpo articles about the text barrage. Turns out the mastermind is a certain “Jason Flanary and his Virginia-based communications firm, ccAdvertising,” (Politico), and that GoDaddy has suspended use of the domains he was sending messages from for “spam and abuse.” In other words, kids — don’t try this at home! Thanks to Shaun Dakin for the initial tip.

– cpd