ATLANTA — With Georgia being a top battleground state, your phone is probably starting to blow up with political calls and texts.
Turns out the “Do Not Call List” does not apply to those political calls. But Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray has found a way that you limit them.
The company Robo Killer did a study of the 2022 election year and found Americans received 15 billion political texts and 384,000,000 calls.
Like many others, Danny Abernathy is sick of getting them.
“It is just a big old pain in the butt,” Abernathy said.
Viewers shared recent texts with Gray that named President Biden, former President Obama, and the RNC, even dropping Hollywood names like Robert De Niro and George Clooney and asking if you want a ballot in the mail.
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You may be surprised to know the Do Not Call list doesn’t apply to political calls and texts. So how do you stop them?
Unfortunately, there’s no one magic way. It may take a combination, and even then, you may be able to limit them, but not totally eliminate them.
You can block the number, but that doesn’t stop new numbers.
For text specifically, you can adjust the settings on your phone to weed out messages from numbers you don’t recognize.
Just know if you limit them to numbers in your contacts list, you may miss some texts from some legitimate texters.
What about replying stop to unsubscribe? If you do that, you may be telling the texter a real person exists and invite more text.
There are two kinds of calls and texts: those dialed manually and those dialed automatically.
The law is different for each. Political campaigns need your permission to robocall or robotext. They don’t need your permission to manually dial you.
If you get a political call or text you think breaks the law, you can file a complaint with the FCC.
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