Just tried to send a friend a story about Parkinson’s from lemmy.world and every single time TMobile strips the link from my SMS. They let tumblr.com though.
I just looked up if they’re actively censoring other sites and, yes. They are. They claim they’re only doing this to obscure domains (.xyz and so on) but I just watched a YouTuber demonstrate .com censorship too. So it seems it’s less arbitrary than they claim.
https://community.t-mobile.com/accounts-services-4/why-is-t-mobile-censoring-our-sms-40519
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/rskfmx/video_evidence_of_tmobiles_sms_blocking_the_more/
The conservatives are crying about it like it’s just them getting censored but it seems it’s beyond party lines if I can’t share an article about Parkinson’s research.
This seems and sounds very bad but I would bet this is more of a result of filtering or anti spam protocols than active censoring. Could be several different companies or ISPs or datacenters it goes through since SMS is such an old and inefficient service. Best idea would be to switch to different messaging app that isn’t whatsapps or use RCS
If true, it actually makes some sense. An older generation with poor eyesight seems likely to fall for legit-looking scam texts with links to copycat domains like “arnazon” and “UPS.gov.co”.