Political texts inundating phones

Well, is your phone blowing up with political text messages, especially with one night to go before election day? If so, you are far from being alone. Fox 13's Aaron Mesmer joins us now. Now, Aaron. We know these texts will likely stop after tomorrow, but is there anything that voters could do to stop them? Well, first of all, we hope they're going to stop after tomorrow, and we assume they will, of course. But unfortunately, the answer seems to be not really. Political text messaging is exempt from the national Do Not Call registry, and it's an inexpensive way to advertise. So we see more and more every single election cycle, and now we're even seeing celebrities joining in. So look, make your way to the ballot box on Tuesday, November 5th. Yeah, have you gotten that one? It's a recorded message about voting from celebrity Ice-T. We heard from several people who said they got that one today. Meanwhile, it's hard to pinpoint exactly how many political texts are going out, and we don't know yet how many we're going to see this year or what this year's estimate will be. However, the call and text blocking app RoboKiller has been analyzing the data for several years years and counted about 15 billion Political Texts in 2022. RumbleUp, that's a political texting company, predicted that number would be about $25 billion in 2024. And when you add up all the estimates between 2020 and 2024, you're looking at potentially more than 60 billion text messages. The earliest figures we could find, meanwhile, were about $350 million back in 2018. So that's like a 7,000% jump. UCF political science professor Aubrey Jewett believes this election cycle will likely set a record for political texts. And it's all about One, reaching out to voters in a cost-effective way, and two, doing it in a way that's most likely to actually be looked at by the voters. And that's why text messages are still one of the top ways to get contact with voters. Because unlike a TV commercial, which you may just fast-forward through or never even see, or something like that, when you get a text, if or however briefly, you're almost certainly going to look and see what it is. Jewett tells us that most campaigns get our phone numbers from voter registrations. Some of them also hire companies to data mine this kind of information. And he says AI... He's now helping campaigns target voters who might be interested in certain messaging, Haley. I got to hand it to them. The iced tea strategy was creative, and I'm sure it got people to at least stop and hit play and see what it was all about. But we're thankful we're almost done. Almost. You told us that there's no real way to stop them officially, but there are some ways that we can silence them? Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, again, there's no foolproof way to stop all of these messages Again, political texts are exempt from the Do Not Call registry, but you can text STOP each time to unsubscribe, and political campaigns are supposed to do that when you send that text message. You can also block each individual number on your phone and even change the settings in your phone to block texts from unknown numbers. So remember that for the next election cycle. Feels like they send every text message from a different number. Exactly. All right. Thanks so much, Aaron.