Pelosi campaign settles with Illinois man over SMS spam
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Are political messages exempt from the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? As the FCC explains, while campaigns are exempt from the "do not call" list requirements, the TCPA does still bring specific rules that even political campaigns must follow.
So then....I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. As reported by Bryan Metzger for Business Insider, Nancy Pelosi's campaign recently settled with an Illinois man over allegations that they SMS spammed him even though he's registered with the do-not-call list. TCPA does contain a private right of action clause, and it does require that political text messages either be opt-in or "manually dialed." Maybe the campaign was worried that their messages could be construed as "robotexts" instead of "manually dialed?" I don't know enough to say, but it's curious to me that they settled.
But now I understand why all of the annoying political text messages I received in the run-up to the recent Chicago mayoral election were manually sent by individuals instead of directly served up via SMS automation -- that's seemingly their loophole to be allowed to annoy all of us. I wonder if that'll be a loophole that gets harder and harder to exploit as mobile platforms and providers improve their spam reporting and blocking mechanisms.
Are political messages exempt from the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? As the FCC explains, while campaigns are exempt from the "do not call" list requirements, the TCPA does still bring specific rules that even political campaigns must follow.
So then....I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. As reported by Bryan Metzger for Business Insider, Nancy Pelosi's campaign recently settled with an Illinois man over allegations that they SMS spammed him even though he's registered with the do-not-call list. TCPA does contain a private right of action clause, and it does require that political text messages either be opt-in or "manually dialed." Maybe the campaign was worried that their messages could be construed as "robotexts" instead of "manually dialed?" I don't know enough to say, but it's curious to me that they settled.
But now I understand why all of the annoying political text messages I received in the run-up to the recent Chicago mayoral election were manually sent by individuals instead of directly served up via SMS automation -- that's seemingly their loophole to be allowed to annoy all of us. I wonder if that'll be a loophole that gets harder and harder to exploit as mobile platforms and providers improve their spam reporting and blocking mechanisms.
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