How can you stop unwanted political texts? A Massachusetts man is developing a free app to stop spam

BOSTON — It’s election season and people are being bombarded with political text messages. WBZ TV addressed this topic in Maybut a successful Massachusetts business owner has found a solution that he believes could permanently solve the problem.

How to stop political text messages?

In WBZ-TV’s original story, a teenager too young to vote was harassed by robotic political texters.

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

Cybersecurity expert Peter Tran said people should simply reply “Stop” to log out, then delete it and report it as junk.

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

Who is Paul English?

The story sparked a lot of messaging among viewers. One of them was by Paul English.

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

“We made a lot of people happy the day we sold,” English said. “I have given away half of my kayak money so far and am involved in many charitable organizations.”

English is still developing apps, including one that he believes can solve the problem of political robot texts. His latest creation came about while he was having dinner with a friend, Vinayah Ranade.

“My friend receives a political text. He looks at it and says: ‘[Expletive] another political text. “We have to do something about it,” English said.

How does the SpamStrike app work?

That’s why English and Ranade worked together to develop “SpamStrike,” an app that supposedly blocks all political texts.

The app keeps a list of keywords that typically come up, such as candidate names, words like “donate,” “vote,” and “poll.” And you can add to the list.

It then uses artificial intelligence to examine all flagged messages to find out which other words represent red flags. In the month the app was online, it is said to have blocked almost 150,000 text messages.

The app only blocks political conversations from people who are not your contacts. So what happens when a mistake happens?

“If you go into your Messages app, there is a junk folder and SpamStrike is listed there. Everything we filtered is there. So if you don’t trust and want to see what we do, we won’t. “I’m not deleting it. It just goes into your junk folder,” English said.

English said he doesn’t want to make money from the app.

“Right now the idea is to stop the spam immediately. We just do it for free, we almost look at it as a return to the community,” English said.

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

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