Good security can be bad politics. That’s certainly the case with iOS 26, the latest albeit confusingly rebadged iPhone software update that’s due this fall. A “silent” change has now come under attack from politicians, who warn of “profound implications.”
This is all about iMessage, and Apple’s latest innovation to combat the scourge of malicious or just plain irritating text messages bombarding our phones daily.
Apple is upping its game filtering texts into Spam and Unknown categories, silencing notifications and preventing any interaction with texts — such as links or replies. This targets marketeers as well as bad actors. But it also hits political fundraisers.
As picked up by John Gruber’s ‘Daring Fireball,’ a “Republican election group is attempting to organize against text message filtering in iOS 26.” The group is “freaking out,” about the prospect of fundraising texts being lost to Apple’s new filters.
In the letter, per Punchbowl News, NRSC says Apple’s “aggressive message filtering” will catch political texts “from verified and compliant senders,” which will be “treated as spam by default, silently sent to an ‘Unknown’ inbox with no alerts or notifications.”
This, the group warns, “has profound implications for our ability to fundraise, mobilize voters, and run digital campaigns.” It will impact “every political message.” And because “70% of small-dollar donations come via text, and iPhones make up 60% of U.S. mobile devices, the macro effect could be over $500M in lost GOP revenue.”
You can enable a setting to “Filter Unknown Senders” on your iPhone already, and you should do exactly that. You can find this in Settings—Apps—Messages—Unknown & Spam. iOS 26 will differentiate between Spam and Unknown, which enables additional protections for Spam texts to be introduced — and that’s long overdue.
“I do think, though, that many more iOS users will be using this feature starting with iOS 26,” Gruber says. “It’s both better designed and less hidden.” Malicious text campaigns have also spiraled in the last 12 months are now “out of control.”
Frequent warnings from U.S. law enforcement agencies have been issued as unpaid tolls, DMV fines and now Amazon refunds spawn billions of texts from industrial-scale cellphone farms operating from overseas.
The other political dimension here is that the bulk of those malicious text campaigns originate from China’s organized criminal gangs. That puts them well beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement given the strained international politics over technology.
