Anonymous text messages containing disturbing content — such as claiming Black Americans had been “selected to pick cotton” — were sent the day after Election Day, targeting recipients in more than 20 states.

These types of threatening, racist messages should have never been able to be sent. Unfortunately, our country doesn't have strict data privacy protections for citizens' cellphone numbers and has continued to loosen federal wireless gateway spam rules. It was only a matter of time before someone spewed hate-filled messages through these channels.

It didn't used to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be.

In 2008, broadcast text messaging was a new form of communication that was strictly governed and spam-free. That year, I had the privilege of sending some of our nation's first text messages for civic engagement. It took months to set up Barack Obama’s unique shortcode, a five-digit phone number authorized to send text messages citizens had to affirmatively opt in to receive. The opt-in was the primary, but not the only, safeguard for the experience. Shortcodes, as is the case today, must be provisioned through a single, national registry, approved by each mobile carrier and monitored on an ongoing basis. 

In 2008 this was all the more important because U.S. consumers were paying premium pricing for text messaging packages. Texting was a clean network, with a nearly 100 percent read rate and zero spam. During this golden era of text messaging, politicians universally agreed that spamming citizens was bad. The 1991 Telecommunications Consumer Protections Act and the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 prevented anyone from........

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