A Firm Aimed At Fighting Disinformation In Political Texting Has Trump Ties, Serious Conflicts
With Election Day only 53 days away, campaigns are scrambling to contact every voter they can. Text messaging has become an indispensable tool in the desperate quest to reach people, bypassing email inboxes cluttered with promotions and spam, and breaking through amid the flashing ads of the internet and promoted posts on social media. Text messaging can be more personal, and it’s direct.
But text messaging is also a minimally regulated space and, like any platform, there is the potential for malfeasance. Who is really on the other end of that random number that just reached out? Bad actors have already bought phone numbers with which to bombard people with spam or disinformation. In 2018, someone falsely claiming to be affiliated with then-Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke texted voters with a request for help transporting undocumented immigrants to polling booths so they could vote, a message seemingly designed to legitimize Republican fearmongering around voter fraud. Last month, someone pretending to be Republican congressional candidate Byron Donalds texted voters that Donalds was dropping out of the race on the day of the primary, an apparent effort to discourage people from voting for him.
Wireless carriers do filter spam, but they are understandably reluctant to referee what is or is not a legitimate political communication. So this year, a group called Campaign Verify stepped into the breach. The nonprofit describes itself as a nonpartisan service that provides identity verification to federal campaigns, parties and PACs to protect them from being spoofed by bad actors or filtered as spam by wireless carriers.
Campaign Verify gives customer campaigns a secret PIN code via mail or email, and campaigns are supposed to use those codes to generate “secure authorization tokens” that texting platforms then use to show wireless carriers the messages are coming from legitimate political actors. Campaign Verify charges hundreds to thousands...
