Horrible voter outreach.
This isn’t how the democrats reach out. This is an info op.
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.
So we think a fake outreach is redirecting people to a real Dem PAC? It’s convoluted but I could see it happening.
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.
brb gonna send them some porn to make sure they don’t accidentally “count my vote”
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.
which benefits nobody
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”.
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.
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.
I think sending people phishing links is illegal…
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.
US politics are so wild that it’s really hard for me to distingish satire from reality.
For those of us in the US that are not Blue MAGA or Red MAGA, it’s getting hard to distinguish hell from reality.
What is Blue MAGA?
Good faith would be the “vote blue no matter who” and “every vote not for biden is a vote for DRUMPF” crowd
Pretty sure it’s a far right false equivalence
Oh lmao. Some enlightened centrist bullshit. Advocating for public transportation and healthcare are the same thing as literal fascism to them, I guess.
I have read this interaction like 5 times and I still can’t figure out what the fuck blue MAGA is supposed to be.
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.
#RatifyICESCR.
Go away.
“Someone called out my blue maga bullshit. Better put my fingers in my ears and tell them to shut up.”
Just block me, don’t try to strip me of my Human Right to share an opinion, regardless of frontier.
Same as Black MAGA
There’s White MAGA, which is independents joining forces to MAGA. Black MAGA, from what I’ve been told, is only practiced in UFC rings.
Leftists that try to MAGA
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Something one says when one is committed to bothsidesing but not stupid or shameless enough to pretend an insurrection is a tour group.
The latest russian propaganda term
It describes modern Democrats, who have followed Republican down the path to full blown fascism.
Run on your own merit? Doesn’t exist anymore.
Make your entire platform a big ol scapegoaty “but TrUmP!!!@!”
Nevermind the full bore support of the militarized police state and the genocide.
You expect it out of the reds.
It is deeply distressing to see the blues doing it too.
What the fuck are you taking about??? Trump tried to violently overthrow an election.
When did Dems even do anything remotely like that?
The logical conclusion from your post says vote Dem anyway cuz still the lesser of two evils.
Unless you’re saying vote for progressives in the primaries.
You don’t seem to have a clue as to what fascism actually is.
And another dumdum with binary brain appears to justify why America should be committing genocide and expanding the military police state.
BeCaUsE tRuMp!!@!
Hell is where we are, while reality is a TV show…
Nobody should respond to that. It’s the senders data set that’s being polluted, not the receivers.
explain with some actual technical data to support your assertion?
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 the PAC as the sender and the OP would be the recipient of the text message.
However, the OP (or anyone filling out the poll) would be the sender and the PAC would be the receiver of the poll data.
So which sender is it you think will have polluted data? The OP or the PAC?
If the PAC gets polluted data, oh well.
The OP never receives poll data, so their “data set” is always empty and will never be polluted.
edit: will never be polluted with anything other than the PAC spam lol, you are right there
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.
Indeed.
My understanding of the previous zeitgeist was that no one cares if you flood a poll like this with data to pollute it.
Not that I’d advocate doing that.
Arguably crosses a line of criminality.
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
It could be spoofed, foreign robocalls are rampant.
EDIT: This one’s probably not spoofed, since the OP provided the domain address below and it’s registered to a member of the PAC.
Indeed, tracking back robonumbers is not nearly as easy.
But, the poll exists, is as described, and the finger of the websites matches with an existing, real PAC, so this is probably not a spoofed message.
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!
They’ve been sending me all kinds of scare-tactic spam.
Afaik the “cat h line” of this is true isn’t it?
I’m going to guess this is a tactic used to push Democrats away from voting by poisoning the well.
Acting like Democrats reaching out in order to spoil the image and make actual communication less effective.
And based on the comments in this thread it obviously works, folks fall for this hook line and sinker.
Well that’s definitely not some scam. What’s the betting that the URL asks you for a load of personal information to confirm your identity.
Me: [receiving an obvious identity theft SMS] is this Blue MAGA?
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…
Oh come on you can’t say that and not give a sample.
I mean I would but I’d rather not get banned from this community :p
You didn’t ask for gay furry bondage porn
The manual replier be like
By responding, regardless of what you say… you’ve given them information that you exist as a human.
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.
I junk hit the delete and report junk link on iPhone to these types of SPAM.
I’ve probably blocked 100 numbers by now.
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.
TIL!
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
What if we send pics of Manet’s Olympia? That painting was considered scandalous in its time, but it’s classified as fine art now.
Or sending classical nude figures, or kouros figures(ancient Greek sculptures of nude men.) That could be fun, and confusing.
Yeah, all my replies are “art”, not just two people banging. I mean, they are still banging, but it’s drawn. Lewdly, and in detail. But artistically.
Yeah I’d counter sue. I sure as fuck have the right to express myself via text
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.
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It’s anyone or Trump!
This is how our 2 party system works.
No one else can get to 270 but Joe.
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.
Wake. The. Fuck. Up.
Imagine if those were the polls that show Biden behind.
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.
Eric should have stayed in the private sector and gone bankrupt.
lol Blue MAGA that’s a good one, thank you for that
Why censor the link? Perhaps I would like to provide feedback. Purely constructive criticism mind you.
Here’s the URL. I blurred out an identifier part of the URL.
https://training-dems.us/poll-may-16-2
Edit: tracked the domain, registered to one Eric Mayefsky, bruh who is ‘building apps for the left’
Thank you
I fed it an email address of “[email protected]” to see what the poll questions were… this one is telling:
Anyone catch what’s missing?
“The economy”?
“Inflation”?
“Wars in Gaza or Ukraine”?
Whoever put this together has fucked up priorities.
They’re not real polls I used to give a lot to Dems, so I still get a shit of spam from them.
One time it actually just looked like a legit poll they wanted his likely voters to take…
It was three bullshit questions, and one of them was how bad trump is. Then it took me to a donation page with $100 default and a big countdown clock. I wanted to see what would happen so I waited the two minutes. The countdown started again, it was a loop.
No way to submit survey unless you donated too. So even if they cared about results it was only if you gave and likely to be rated by how much you gave.
Both parties are obsessed with donations because that’s a nice lifestyle when your job is getting the donations. And that’s all it takes these days to get senior leadership positions in the DNC or Biden campaign, just bring in as much money possible.
That means more of this bullshit, that probably turns off more potential donors than anything.
It’s why I also stopped signing online petitions, relentless spam asking for donations. Uhh, I’m pretty sure I could better use the donations, say for healthcare, glasses instead of Dollar Tree Readers, a cavity and tooth cleaning, actually healthy food again, a proper vet exam for my fur baby instead of skipping X-rays he needed…
Which is why the DNC doesn’t care about you.
They made donations their priority over votes a long time ago.
If votes were the important part, they’d have to interact with regular voters. Their lives are way better if they spent that time at huge 100k a plate fundraisers with celebrities and amazing food.
Yes, exactly!
Fucking UN Human Rights aren’t on that list.
https://train-dems.us resolves to https://traindemocrats.org
“Paid for by the National Democratic Training Committee PAC”
edit: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/person/54951-76P
“Eric has a PhD in Economics from Stanford and worked on Facebook’s ad auctions for over 3 years. He’s currently working on a behavioral finance startup.”
“behavioral finance” code word for psychological manipulation using money, typical Blue MAGA
edit 2: someone else had claimed to have verified that the whois for both urls matched, but I did not double check. After double-checking, in actuality, they do not match - train-dems goes to the Amazon Registrar wheres traindemocrats goes to the Cloudflare Registrar.
It is not likely that a website operator would utilize two different registrars like that, so this is instead a likely case of outside interference.
Blue MAGA should be ashamed of using the UN UDHR as a checklist for a platform instead of practicing Human Rights and ratifying ICESCR.
And Mr Eric Mayefsky, apologies, and I just hope that you will not be practicing any dark patterns of psychology.
“behavioral finance” code word for psychological manipulation
Funnily enough that’s exactly how I interpret “former monetisation manager at Meta” as well.
former monetisation manager at Meta
elsewhere he described it as “has a PhD in Economics from Stanford and worked on Facebook’s ad auctions for over 3 years”
our best and brightest, working hard to screw us over. Thanks Stanford!
This is the DCCC.
Your donation dollars at work.
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)?
edit: easier than i thought,
Whois search at whois.us shows the registrar for training-dems.us is this guy:
traindemocrats.org shows all redacted for privacy.
It all ends up with the DCCC or gets directed by the DCCC.
You should be able to look it up, but its all a PAC shell game at this point.
<sarcasm?>lets make a PAC to send each and every donor to this PAC a spam</sarcasm?>
depends on what the spam contains; if it contains
- a reference to the content of the text message that the OP received
- a kindly worded paragraph describing how much we appreciate their political activism
- a kindly worded paragraph explaining the dark patterns of politics (e.g., using psychological manipulation)
- a kindly worded paragraph requesting that the donor write to their PAC and ask them to stop using their money for dark patterns
- an offer for them to become an independent, White MAGA instead of Blue MAGA or Red MAGA
- thank them again for their political activism
then probably not criminal
