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
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.
Freedom of speech is the right to express opinions without government restraint, not without corporate restraint.
I just tested this myself between tmo and GV and no censorship here.
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.
We will need to watch closely because this might be a experiment that only applies to a few people.
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
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.
Always hits me like a truck when I hear Americans still use SMS
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.
