Horrible voter outreach.
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?
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.
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Just block me, don’t try to strip me of my Human Right to share an opinion, regardless of frontier.
The latest russian propaganda term
Something one says when one is committed to bothsidesing but not stupid or shameless enough to pretend an insurrection is a tour group.
Please, god, don’t let this stupid label catch on…
Good faith would be the “vote blue no matter who” and “every vote not for biden is a vote for DRUMPF” crowd
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.
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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.
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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
Hell is where we are, while reality is a TV show…
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.
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…
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’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.
I hate when it’s my number being used for spoofing, try explaining caller ID spoofing to grandma or grandpa.
I junk hit the delete and report junk link on iPhone to these types of SPAM.
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.
Futa for the win. And I’m not talking the Federal Unemployment Tax Act.
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
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
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.
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 I’d counter sue. I sure as fuck have the right to express myself via text
So how does this differ from sending unsolicited dick pics? Do people have a right to express their penises via text?
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?
Nobody should respond to that. It’s the senders data set that’s being polluted, not the receivers.
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!
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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
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
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
It’s anyone or Trump!
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.
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.
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’
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!
Thank you
brb gonna send them some porn to make sure they don’t accidentally “count my vote”
@[email protected] Question for you
What do you mean by “blue MAGA”? I mean I know it’s the Democrats, but why that term specifically?
spoiler
sdfsaf
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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.
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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).
Blue MAGA is a subculture of the DNC whose purpose is to bully and marginalize anyone who critiques the Dem party leadership.
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.
You don’t think that strongly correlates with maga tactics?
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.
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“Critiques”
Interesting
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?
There’s the Trump cult and the Dem cult. The Blue MAGA are the ones that defend any and all criticism of the Democratic Party, to a cult-like status.
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.
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The post is saying “if you don’t like Biden then you are a Trumper.” That’s Blue MAGA cult like behavior.
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.
I get multiple Dem “give us money” texts and calls daily.
Eric should have stayed in the private sector and gone bankrupt.
lol Blue MAGA that’s a good one, thank you for that
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.
