In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a rise in censorship regarding SMS communication that’s not being discussed. At all. I’m concerned that it may become a slippery slope that eventually effects us all. I don’t have any dramatic, prose-ridden introduction this week. Just some news, facts, and observations I wanted to share. So this week, follow me down the rabbit hole as I explore an existing but rising threat to our free speech and what we can do about it.
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if you’re sending or trying to receive a text message with swear words in the U.S., chances are the carrier will block it.
So much for the land of the free. Not even the EU with their chat control bullshit is pushing it so far.
Thanks for sharing the article.
Are you surprised by this? It is SMS after all. I think you could do this with a basic man in the middle.
Yeah, no security there, but I wasn’t expecting to see providers doing that. What’s the point.
I’m not surprised they could. I’ve worked on things that send SMS messages and I’m aware that carriers filter for spam and scams (perhaps not as effectively as one might hope).
I’m surprised to hear of messages being blocked for mere profanity.
Anyway, SMS sucks, default to something else and fall back to SMS as a last resort. Gently encourage your contacts to use Signal.
You probably could do this outside the carrier
Freedom of speech is the right to express opinions without government restraint, not without corporate restraint.
I swear in SMS on the daily, and have shared videos of pro-Palestine protests via sms also. I’m a bit dubious. I did read the article, and it sounds like one carrier-specific issue, and (unsurprisingly) MS allowing enterprise customers to control what is said on Teams.
So two examples that are each either platform or carrier specific.
In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.
I just tested this myself between tmo and GV and no censorship here.
We will need to watch closely because this might be a experiment that only applies to a few people.
I did too, just within TMobile in the US, using the s*** word. Went through just fine.
I texted myself “fuck this” and it went through no problem.
Seems to affect VoIP carriers, I reckon.
GV is a voip carrier.
The message sending “bad” words came from T-mobile or GV?
I sent it from my tmo number to my GV number. I can do the inverse as a test too but I don’t think anything will change.
Try it from GV. My hunch is that the filter is set up for outbound SMS that come from VoIP numbers. Reason: both TNO’s blog post and jmp.chat reports of censorship stem from Mysudo and jmp.chat users, not regular carriers.
Just did, again no issue.
in the uk texts are usually free unlimited, and a majority of people have rcs (rich chat services) enabled which means they are end to end encrypted - and uncensorable. RCS is very similar to imessage in results, though it works in a different way.
RCS doesn’t support encryption natively. Google only has proprietary encryption for Messages app.
“Secure from our competitors”
Aha, there we go. I was trying to put “end to end encrypted” and “Google” together and it just would not compute.
Edited to add: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/what-apples-promise-support-rcs-means-text-messaging
AND there have been news that RCS can be blocked for rooted phones and custom operating systems!
RCS is Google so I wouldn’t use it
Always hits me like a truck when I hear Americans still use SMS
iPhone to iPhone uses iMessage. Android to Android uses RCS. iPhone to Android uses SMS, but that will change soon when Apple finally joins the modern age and implements RCS.
Some people also use signal or WhatsApp, but it’s not as common here.
Last time I sent one was,.10 years ago maybe ? I can’t.remember…
Still.get them. Alas for 2FA
We are just stuck in our ways over here. We just got tap payments a few years ago. Even then some vendors still don’t support tap to pay lol.
I always wondered why the US seems to be a hold out for adopting new technology. It might just because out government is extra slow at getting anything accomplished.
For SMS I wondered if it has something do with communicating between countries. In your experience was their extra charges involved with sending a SMS to someone in another country. (Back in the day when SMS was popular)
Here in the US we can SMS to anyone within the US for no extra charge. And we mostly talk amongst ourselves over here. So cost wise it isn’t an issues. If I was talking to people outside the US there is no way I would use SMS.
Don’t use your phone when driving.
Hold on here is this really true?
I think if texts are failing to send because of swearing this would be headline news as it would affect so many people.
Sort of? It looks like this is unique to SMS over VOIP. Which don’t get me wrong, it’s still fucking stupid. But maybe, just maybe there’s a middle ground between getting inundated in robocallers trying to reach us about our cars extended warranty and not being able to send the word Scunthorpe over SMS.
After my 5 seconds of research, it seems like those SHAFT rules are more for marketing campaigns when your sending out sms messages on mass. Not for Bob and Susan talking about the latest politics. Not sure why OP is getting limited. I can swear over my Google Voice message and I don’t have any issues. I am pretty sure that is SMS over VIOP.
I can too, which is what gets me. Honestly after I think it might boil down to how far removed your provider is from directly getting the number from the FCC(or how trigger happy the entity they’re getting the number from). Also possibly if it’s considered a landline or mobile number, it looks like those are distributed differently.
Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.
