Example: “Text resist to 50409 to save NN.”
How do these numbers work? How do you acquire such a short phone number?
REGGA_TRONIC: at least in the US, these are called shortcodes, and you buy them from [this company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telcordia_Technologies) which has agreements with all the telecoms to support these numbers. as to ‘how do they work,’ well it’s no different than a normal phone number as far as how you interact with the phone network is concerned as the user/provider of a shortcode.
they are really expensive to acquire compared to normal phone numbers and fun fact: every single one of them supports texting STOP to the number to opt out of receiving any more texts from it. supporting this is a requirement of the contract you sign as a company to acquire one of these numbers (or at least was when i looked into it for the company i worked for).
source: worked at a company where we briefly looked into buying a shortcode to use when sending text message based notifications to our customers, and decided it was not worth it at all.
__skrr: Could be completely wrong here but I am quite sure it works with partnership with a cell company. The cell company can make any numbers they wanted to and the show is partnered up with them to split up the profits from the phone calls and text messages like 60-40 or something which is still a stupid amount of money.
It basically forwards to a shortened phone number that moves to a program, that takes the contents that text message and tallies it up with whatever contestant it is.
For Example:
`if is “resist” then`
` votes_of_person gets incremented by 1`