Apple's iOS 26 Text Filters Could Cost Political Campaigns Millions of Dollars

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Business Insider: Apple's new spam text filtering feature could end up being a multimillion-dollar headache for political campaigns. iOS 26 includes a new feature that allows users to filter text messages from unrecognized numbers into an 'Unknown Senders' folder without sending a notification. Users can then go to that filter and hit 'Mark as Known' or delete the message.

In a memo seen by BI and first reported by Punchbowl News, the official campaign committee in charge of electing GOP senators warned that the new feature could lead to a steep drop in revenue. 'That change has profound implications for our ability to fundraise, mobilize voters, and run digital campaigns,' reads a July 24 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC. The memo estimated that the new feature could cost the group $25 million in lost revenue and lead to a $500 million loss for GOP campaigns as a whole, based on the estimate that 70% of small-dollar donations come from text messages and that iPhones make up 60% of mobile devices in the US. Apple's 'rules' for this new spam text filtering feature 'aren't unclear at all,' notes Daring Fireball's John Gruber. 'If a sender is not in your saved contacts and you've never sent or responded to a text message from them, they're considered 'unknown.' That's it.'

'The feature isn't even really new -- you've been able to filter messages like this in Messages for years now, but what iOS 26 changes is that it now has a new more prominent -- better, IMO -- interface for switching between filter views.' It's also worth noting that there's no filtering by message content, so all political parties will be affected by this feature. '[T]here's no reason to believe that Republican candidates and groups will be more affected by this than Democratic ones,' writes Gruber.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.