George Weiner Launches PACspam.org to Trace Political Text Senders as 2024 Texting Spend Hit $65 Million
Updated
Updated · Fox News · Oct 21
George Weiner Launches PACspam.org to Trace Political Text Senders as 2024 Texting Spend Hit $65 Million
3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Oct 21
Summary
PACspam.org lets users paste a political text or upload a screenshot to identify the committee, fundraising link or texting platform behind the message and generate complaint information.
Weiner says blocking usually fails because campaigns use “snowshoeing” — spreading outreach across many phone numbers — so stopping one sender often leaves the same operation free to text again.
His analysis of FEC records found about $65 million was spent on political texting services in the 2024 cycle, with vendors including Switchboard at $17 million, Mothership Strategies at $14.4 million and Message Digital at $10.6 million since 2008.
U.S. rules leave room for unsolicited outreach: manually sent peer-to-peer political texts can fall outside autodialer consent limits, and the National Do Not Call Registry generally does not cover political messages.
Weiner argues users may get better results by contacting the texting platform identified by PACspam, though removals are platform-specific and the tool cannot guarantee texts will stop.