How can you stop unwanted political texts? Man creates free app to end spam

By David Wade

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    BOSTON (WBZ) — It’s election season and people are getting barraged with political text messages. WBZ-TV addressed this issue in May, but a successful business owner from Massachusetts came up with a solution he thinks could solve the problem permanently.

During WBZ-TV’s original story, a teenager who is too young to vote was getting harassed by political robotexts.

“They want me to vote. They want me to send money. It’s a lot. They ask me for a lot,” 15-year-old Madison Medina said at the time.

Cyber security expert Peter Tran said people should simply reply “stop” to unsubscribe, then delete and report as junk.

Even the experts admitted that would slow down, but not stop the avalanche of political texts.

The story prompted many messages from viewers. One of them was from Paul English.

English grew up in West Roxbury, went to UMass and later founded travel behemoth Kayak.com, which was later sold for almost $2 billion in 2012.

“We made a lot of people happy on the day we sold,” English said. “I’ve given away half my Kayak money so far and I’m involved in a lot of non-profits.”

English is still developing apps, including one he believes can solve the problem of political robotexts. His newest creation began when he was at dinner with a friend, Vinayah Ranade.

“My friend gets a political text. He looks at it and says, ‘[Expletive] another political text. We need to do something about this,'” English said.

So English and Ranade co-created “SpamStrike,” an app that claims to block all political texts.

The app keeps a list of keywords that usually pop up, things like candidate names, words like donate, vote and poll. And you can add to the list.

It then uses artificial intelligence to study all of the flagged messages to learn what other words are red flags. In the month the app has been online, it claims to have blocked almost 150,000 texts.

The app only blocks political talk from people not in your contacts. So what happens if there’s a mistake?

“If you go into your messages app there’s a junk folder and you will see SpamStrike listed. Anything we’ve filtered is there. So if you don’t trust it, and you want to see what we’re doing, we don’t delete it. It just goes to your junk folder,” English said.

English said he does not want to make money off the app.

“Right now the idea is end the spam immediately. We are just doing it free, almost think of it as a giveback to the community,” English said.

There are other apps that also block texts. Some cost up to $100 per year.

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