Washington – Republicans could lose millions of dollars in advertising revenue due to a new update of Apple software which implements messages to filter messages designed to suppress spam and unwanted messages.
The latest update, deployed in Apple iOS 26, would target political messages by sending them to a separate reception box without any alert or notifications, argued the National Republican Senate Committee in an internal note obtained by the Deeret News. This change could cost the Committee more than $ 25 million in revenues alone – more than $ 500 million losses for the republican party as a whole, warns the note.
“Each political message – shortcut, long code, does not matter – is pushed in the dark,” said the note. “The only circumvention solution – to respond to a voter – is increasingly rare and entirely at the mercy of the unclear rules of Apple. How will a voter answer if he never receives the message?”
Apple announced the changes at the beginning of June, which allow users to filter the messages of unknown shippers to provide “more control over which appears in their conversation list”. Unknown messages would be directed to a separate file. Users should manually mark messages as “known” to transfer to their main reception box.
All texts will be silenced until a user accepts, according to Apple.
This change would be detrimental to the GOP fund collection efforts, warned the committee and could affect efforts to mobilize voters and disseminate information. The group, which acts as the main collection of fundraising for the Republicans of the Senate, said it had respected “rigorous standards” in its political text campaigns for years, in particular “complete documentation, opt-in proof and messages of messages via the verification of the campaign and the campaign register”.
Not only will the filter modify fundraising to harm – the data cited by the Committee showing that 70% of small dollar donations are provided by SMS, and iPhones represent 60% of mobile devices in the United States – but the memo also supports that it will negatively affect the reminders of the day of the election, rapid response messages and other forms of electoral contact.
“These are time -sensitive critical communications,” said the memo. “iOS 26 breaks it all.”
The Committee circulated the memo to groups urging them to “repel”, accusing trade groups of “sleeping driving”.
“But we only have a few weeks left before public release,” said the memo. “If we want to grow back, it must be now. We have a very narrow window to solve this problem.”
The deployment of the iOS 26 update should make its debut in mid-September. The Deeret News contacted the spokespersons for Apple to comment.
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