Verizon Wireless never sent me the VP text message from the Obama campaign this morning. This disappointed me, of course, because I'm a political junkie and signed up for delivery within minutes of the campaign's first announcement of the event.
At first I thought the non-delivery was odd, but somewhat expected given the (probably) huge volume of messages that Distributive Networks was processing on behalf of the campaign. Glitches happen.
However...
I have spoken with several additional Verizon Wireless customers who also did not receive Obama's VP text.
This is anecdote, not science, but there does seem to be some (at least local) correlation between non-receipt and the Verizon network.
Given Verizon's history of blocking NARAL messaging that it found unacceptable, I begin to wonder if Verizon did not deliberately block Obama's message to some portion of its wireless customers.
So now I'm hunting for some additional data points, trying to see a larger pattern if there is one.
If there does seem to be a larger story, I will budget some research time to follow up.
Are you a Verizon customer who did not receive Obama's text message?
Are you a customer of some other wireless service who did not receive the text?
If you did not receive the message you expected to, regardless of carrier, what part of the country do you live in. Or, more precisely, what part of the country does your cell phone think it lives in (i.e., what's your phone's area code)?
UPDATE: Signing up via sending a text to the Obama campaign vs. signing up via the website opt-in form might have played a role in your eventual receipt or non-receipt of the VP text. Which way did you sign up?
I signed up via the website, but never received a confirmation text, or, ultimately, THE text.
I might run all this by the Distributed Networks folks in the morning to see if they have any informal input. Does not at this point seem to be a Verizon-specific issue.
Or I could send them a big noisy email message at 3:02am. Turnabout is fair play, even though they obviously did not awaken me.
Cheers,
JA
Asheville, NC