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 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.
Only if the effect was party-agnostic. Since the message presents itself as if it comes from Democrat supporters, it may have that effect on Democrat voters - but I fail to see how a Republican voter seeing this will think "These Democrats are so annoying, I'm just going to not vote because they are so annoying".
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.
All unsolicited contacts from these fucks should be illegal. If I want to hear what a candidate thinks about shit I'll look them up myself. I don't need my fucking phone blowing up for 6 months before an election.
Everyone needs to understand that if Joe doesn't get to 270 Congress will literally appoint trump as per the constitution and GOP majority in the house.
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.
Well, even if we say that, the PAC supplies campaign funds to candidates directly. I doubt they even store the answers on their little poll, it just leads directly into a donation portal.
That site doesn't exist. It gets autocorrected to the National Democratic Training Committee. Who famously doesn't do voter outreach. Their mission is to recruit people to actually work inside the party.
You keep assuming there's some kind of good faith here. There is not. This is either the GOP, China, or Russia, trying to depress leftist voting.
Yeah. If I point you to Biden's campaign website after calling you a filthy communist, it doesn't mean it was approved. This is also how the "remember to vote on (day after voting ends)" scams work.
Yeah but why that specific PAC? Maybe they shopped around for a little while to see which one had the most reprehensible site, and found this tech dude's page with a fake bs poll begging for donations?
Well if that's the case then I hope Eric sues the pants off whoever is responsible, but again it's all very convoluted.
It's a shortlink for tracking user engagement. It redirects users to the primary site while making note that someone followed that specific link which was probably set up for their SMS campaign. If you look at the page URL history here you can see where it hits tech dudes site that redirects you to the PAC's main site.
Ah, I think I see what you're saying now. You're not refuting that the site may or may not be affiliated with the PAC but rather adding context that the mere use of the link itself is a form of data collection?
I'm not the person you were going back and forth with, but yeah. The person who set up the redirect could be a service provider, a friend/fan of the PAC, or some other form of third party. If you're curious enough about whether they're acting with the knowledge and blessing of the PAC, you could contact them and ask about OP's message and the shortlink. They would be able to provide more info rather than jumping to conclusions based on unsubstantiated claims of nation state influence operations.
PACs are not nation state entities, they're pipelines for corporations to fund election campaigns. They're a stain on the earth as a whole, that this PAC wants favorable outcomes doesn't change that.
The other person was suggesting that this is a GOP/China/Russia influence campaign, I'm suggesting that this is likely outreach funded by the PAC. Their scummy tactics and coercive language are no better than phishing and/or gift card scams
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...
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.
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.
Enjoy while you can. Places like California are cracking down on unsolicited pics like that. No matter what we feel about unsolicited political texts (I can’t unsubscribe, can you?), we can’t send shit like that back without getting sued.
I’ve changed it up and ask them to bring ductape, hacksaws and some stretch and Flex hefty bags. We’ve got a body to dispose of.
depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and that, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Gotta ask their lawyer about artistic political furry porn
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.
shrug complain to your government about cracking down on number spoofing (something they absolutely have the ability to end at basically a moments notice, but haven't, because there's little incentive). Until then, furry dicks.
So other than responding disagreeably to a critique, what other features? Or just that?
I ask because this type of Hillary Clinton DNC-consultant crap you're screenshotting in this text message has been following Democrats around for quite a while now, consuming their money and providing only failure in return, but MAGA is kind of an incongruous term to use to describe it. Like when I think of MAGA I don't normally think of things like this; right?
Interesting. I think it goes without saying that I don't think this text message is an example of defending any and all criticism of the Democratic Party.
I did a search through comments for the term "Blue MAGA." Most people aren't using it like you said. Most people are using it to refer to the Democrats in general; e.g.:
"Or ask any Blue Maga what specific immigration reforms they want. They want the same thing, they just have minor disagreements on how to get there or even just aesthetics."
"Democrats are just blue MAGA and the only option to fix this country is to burn it down."
"lol blue maga is using red maga's scare tactics to get their favorite pants shitting geriatric to win a popularity contest."
... and so on. I was just curious, though. Carry on.
How many text messages do you get from them, and how many posts have you made on lemmy.world evangelizing for your chosen viewpoint on the exact same issue in various ways, to try to spread it to others, and to disparage people who disagree with you?
Let's say the count of each one over the span of the last three days.
How many blue MAGA ones, though, over the last three days? I can total up the posts of yours that I'd describe as clearly evangelical to your viewpoint, if you don't want to. IDK, maybe you should do it, since you might not agree with how I would categorize the evangelical ones.
Blue MAGA is a subculture of the DNC whose purpose is to bully and marginalize anyone who critiques the Dem party leadership.
What is it called when people make up a name for a group of people and assign motivations to them even though the people doing the naming are massively exaggerating, or seeing a few outliers and painting them as the norm for everyone they disagree with they disagree with?
And the name is specifically designed to resonate in a particular way with the lizard-brain in a way that paints the message "These are the BAD group of people, everyone doesn't like them and shits on them with little nicknames, don't you want to be like everyone, and join us in hating on them too." It's inventive and creative (I mean, sort of) in a memorable way, and carelessly insulting, even though when you look at it, it doesn't make any fucking sense.
It just kinda stuck out to me. Like the post title wasn't "DNC is getting weird again" or "Oh God we're screwed in the fall aren't we" or "Didn't I just GIVE you some money" or anything like that, it was specifically inventing a new little mini-slur to pass around and for everyone to use, free of charge.
Like I say, it just kind of stuck out to me a little.
MAGA tactics at this point means trying to destroy the machinery of democracy and use explicit violence to threaten with death or imprisonment judges, election workers, congresspeople, and anyone else who stands in their way of seizing power. Then, if they are able to regain power, going after any minority or vulnerable person at home or abroad that they can find, simply for the fun and pleasure of exercising cruelty.
The Republicans do send weird fundraising texts sometimes. But, that's not a new thing in American politics or what I would consider anywhere even in the neighborhood of a defining characteristics of MAGA. I think actually turning away from this kind of dogshit DC-consultancy politicking and fundraising and towards more effective and insidious news-media and social-media secret influence campaigns, and simple transfusions of vast infusions of dirty money from billionaires and foreign oligarchs, is more MAGA's style than this type of text message. Although, again, they do still send text messages, I'm sure.
I would define assigning insulting nicknames to your opponents, and repeating them even though they don't really correspond to reality even a little bit, to try this sort of middle-school level of influence to turn people away from your opponents (and apply a tag of "the enemy" in the eyes of your groupthinking followers) to be MAGA tactics, though.
As far as I can tell, Ozma is redefining it here. The other Perfectly Legitimate Leftists aren't trying to make any distinction of a particular segment of the Democrats who are "blue MAGA"; they're just using the term to mean the Democrats are exactly the same as the Trump party and so there's no point voting for either of them.
That is, of course, insane. I think they're hoping it'll produce their desired result on the election through sheer repetition and weight of "emperor definitely has clothes" peer pressure, but who knows. Also, why Ozma is using it in his different way, who knows, although I have a theory.
I think he just independently arrived at it on his own, with this very specific definition as applied to this one particular establishment segment of the Democratic Party, because he had really strong feelings created because all his pro-Democrats-winning-elections productive feedback was being short sightedly ignored. He's just trying to get through to them how important it is for them to start using more successful tactics to win the election and defeat Trump, because he totally thinks that's important and he's working hard to try to make it happen.
But then, independently, a whole different group of perfectly legitimate leftists invented the same term and started applying it (in front of a different audience with a somewhat different receptiveness level to transparent bullshit and groupthink), but using a different meaning and framing, which they also independently came up with, to encourage people to the totally different but still organically arrived at result of not wanting to vote for Joe Biden.
Or, wait, I'm not sure I think that. Now that I type it out it seems a little farfetched all put together. There must be some explanation, though.
I've only ever voted for Dems but what can we call people that criticize you for saying the Democratic party is shit and its leadership deserves bedbugs in their homes for eternity?
I've never been able to support anyone other than a democrat, but I can't get myself to even call myself a democrat, I would consider that insulting based on the policy choices democratic leadership supports and fights for - things like spending significant money to assist specific Republicans win their campaigns or changing rules specifically to make it more difficult for Democrats that disagree with DNC leadership to win against the ones they do support.
I want the D party to be something I can wholeheartedly support, but I don't and I never have been able to. The people that do support DNC leadership are not my allies (at least in the primary and all other times, except during a general election).
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.
Ehhhhhhh it's pretty much always been the case that a single poll by itself is very sketchy data. You gotta look at multiple independent polls. If you want to actually predict the election they had all better be from the last few days before voting ends, because most voters don't make up their mind until the last second.
I'm not talking about single polls, I'm talking about the aggregate of all the polling for the election (although there was one election with only one poll existing for it, the ones that were aggregates of multiple polls were just as bad). It's not like one poll said +26 and one said +4. They're usually within a few percentage points of each other.
And these were polls from much much closer to the election than all these polls the media is treating as a big deal for the November election.
Who here is gathering the data? Certainly not the person receiving the text message.
I would just mark this shit as spam, but it's clearly intended to get a response through attacking people's political identity. It's manipulative and shady.
I see how that could be confusing, but in the context of this one screenshot, one party sent a message, and another received it, and there presumably was no reply.
It pollutes the senders data set because its entirely fallacious to assume that the only reason why some one would choose not to assert their opinion is only because they hold a specific opinion. The resulting data would be inherently skewed towards a particular result.
Imagine you are taking orders for lunch for an office of coworkers and you were just told people that you are going l to order a hamburger for anyone who doesn't explicitly say they wanted chicken and gave them a limited time to respond. You are very likely going to find some angry coworkers who wanted chicken but were stuck in a meeting. You will likely have a small population of people who realized it was Tuesday and had been really looking forward to tacos. And certainly, the vegetarians in the office are going to try to sabotage you professionally for awhile.
And certainly, the vegetarians in the office are going to try to sabotage you professionally for awhile.
Well, they might be upset, but let’s not put the cart before the horse. Hopefully they don’t jump straight to sabotage and start with a kindly worded email heh.
just told people that you are going l to order a hamburger for anyone who doesn't explicitly say they wanted chicken and gave them a limited time to respond
ok, now i’m starting to pick up what you two were putting down! thanks for de-confusing me a little, let me go back and re-read with that new understanding
Happy to help, sorry rushed a little bit to finish the last reply. Effectively the point the original replier was trying to make is that the data set is polluted with bad data because the collection method is just terrible. So back to the analogy I started setting up earlier. If the goal is to get everyone food, you technically win... Job done... Good job. Food will arrive, some people will get the chicken they specifically requested, and maybe a few people who actually wanted hamburgers will be happy too...
But if the goal is to know what your coworkers actually wanted to eat and get it for them, then the only orders you will certainly get right would be for the people who actually wanted chicken, had the opportunity to reply, and took time out of their day to confirm there order. But you will also have people who maybe aren't that keen on chicken but ordered it because they really didn't want a hamburger.
Everyone else will now get a hamburger... That includes people who actually wanted hamburgers, people who didn't have a preference, people with a preference but it's something other than chicken or hamburgers, people who actually wanted chicken but didn't get their order in on time, people who brought there lunch and planned on eating it instead, people who thought the message you sent was a scam and didn't reply but would have said chicken if they had known it was actually legit, people who told you in person they wanted chicken and didn't realise they still needed to email you, people you sent the email to but were actually on vacation or working from remote that day, etc. All of them, hamburgers... How exciting... LOOK HOW POPULAR HAMBURGERS ARE EVERYONE! I can't believe hamburgers beat chicken! Can you believe that 67.3% of our office is such fans of hamburgers?!
Basically the results of a poll constructed like in the original post would be utterly trash, because the method being used is horseshit and not how any serious poller would/should ever conduct a poll.
Basically the results of a poll constructed like in the original post would be utterly trash
As someone who spent some time professionally as a software engineer at a market research company, I can indeed tell you that these results will be utter trash lol.
I totally get what you are saying, now.
These kind of “polls” are just simplistic versions of typical marketing surveys where the sender is trying to get the lay of the land.
In marketing, surveys are usually crafted with quite a lot more care than this.
The software that I got to work on at that company helped with building humane surveys - we had a pretty slick setup where the researchers could craft entire logic trees to handle all the different types of paths that you were listing out.
Professional, Ethical Marketers do 100x better than this utter trash poll.
edit: whoops, apologies if this violates any community rules for being marketing apolgetic, my bad
Beautiful! Yeap that's a very clean parallel and also extremely important in that field as well.
Since this has turned into a lovely exchange I want to offer one more point for your consideration.
Where the outcome of marketing data typically intends to position a product or service in to it's most profitable position, and the quality of the data produced can be somewhat validated by future sales/market share/market depth/etc.
Polls like the one we are discussing aren't constrained in the same manner and may be maliciously and purposefully designed to generate biased data. Humans are inherently vulnerable to hostile psychological manipulations. If this poll specifically isn't just an outright scam intended to get its recipient to click on some link that load a payload of malware, it is certainly designed to purposefully create skewed empirical data.
Not everyone, but certainly a small minority of people who may have not necessarily felt certain about where they stood either direction could look at the results of a poll like this and might find a tinge of doubt in the back of their heads. This sort of tactic hopes that a person will feel a paranoia that everyone else seems to know something significant that they don't and drive social anxieties up. Again, not always, but also not uncommonly, we can find ourself doubting even deeply felt personal resolve on a topic or position if it feels like the vast majority of people disagree with us. This sort of cognitive bias warfare isn't intended to immediately flip a persons perspective, but rather it's designed to soften a persons resolve and introduce enough doubt that they may become susceptible to being flipped later. It's why we need to embrace healthy skepticism and be willing to be more stoic with how we consume numbers others prepped for us.
is sort of cognitive bias warfare isn't intended to immediately flip a persons perspective, but rather it's designed to soften a persons resolve and introduce enough doubt
it’s almost like they have to use dark patterns because they don’t have anything actually relevant to offer?
I take it that you operate in the political field, professionally?
Much love friend, have a great day/evening!
Love your enthusiasm and kindness, thank you friend! Much love and back atcha
Your post just made my day :D
It’s past time for me to hop off lemmy for the day, but I have some further thoughts percolating in regard to the rest of your post. Maybe expect a further reply in the near future!
It's not a legit text. The sender isn't looking to gather information, they're looking to push a dichotomy narrative to get people pissed at each other. It's working even better than intended, we have people arguing in this thread!
Oh lmao. Some enlightened centrist bullshit. Advocating for public transportation and healthcare are the same thing as literal fascism to them, I guess.
More Blue MAGA psyops - you are advocating for a checklist of things in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and acting like it is the same thing as actually practicing Human Rights.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
You have NO rights to post shit on social media sites dude. NONE. That’s not how it works. This shit can be brought down by a handful of people’s decision.
how does not allowing you to post in a lemmy instance violate your human rights?
you realize the right to free speech is a guarantee that the government won't interfere with your speech, printed comments etc., but doesn't require third parties to carry your (or mine or anyone else's) silly bullshit, right?
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
I love how you post it over and over again like it helps you, but you don't understand what it says or means.
If you want to post your shit to the internet, go ahead. Make your own server, your own website or whatever. But no private provider (like, for example, a Lemmy server) is forced to help you do whatever you want. Jeezus. It's like looking at a sovereign citizen.
Since you actually were the one that failed to understand what “impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” means within Article 19, UNUDHR, and you subconsciously knew you didn’t understand what you were reading, but your brain couldn’t handle that scary fact, so you instead turn it around and projected it onto me.
It’s like your brain is doing “i’m rubber, you’re glue” without you actually wanting to do it on purpose.
I call them blue wave (🔵 🌊) idiots. They think getting in people that identify as Democrat will solve all the problems. I think calling them Blue MAGA is disingenuous.
Just to fact-check that statement, anyone know how to follow the money on “National Democratic Training Committee PAC” (https://traindemocrats.org, which is what train-dems.us resolves to)?
