SEA CHANGE: Influential Atlanta Federal Judge Holds SMS Messages Are Not “Telephone Calls” Under the TCPA’s DNC Rules

The Honorable Thomas W. Thrash of the Northern District of Georgia is well known—and well regarded— for his thoughtful and direct orders.

And he may have just entered one of his most consequential rulings to date—concluding that SMS messages are not telephone calls for TCPA purposes.

In Radvansky v. 1-800-Flowers.com, 2026 WL 456919 (N.D. Ga Feb. 17, 2026) Judge Thrash concluded the statutory language of the TCPA simply did not include SMS messages within its purview:

Statutory interpretation must “start with the text”—and, if the text is clear, the analysis “end[s] there as well.” Young v. Grand Canyon Univ., Inc., 980 F.3d 814, 818-19 (11th Cir. 2020). The statutory text here is clear that only telephone calls are actionable under ? 227(c)(5), not text messages. As one district court noted, “in common American English usage, a telephone call and a text message are separate and distinct forms of communication.” Sayed, 2025 WL 2997759, at *2. True, the meaning of these terms should be considered as they were understood at the time the TCPA was enacted, prior to the invention of text messages. See Loper Bright Enters., 603 U.S. at 400. But “[w]here the language Congress chose to express its intent is clear and unambiguous, that is as far as we go to ascertain its intent because we must presume that Congress said what it meant and meant what it said.” United States v. Steele, 147 F.3d 1316, 1318 (11th Cir. 1998). And as Judge May aptly pointed out, Congress has amended the TCPA as recently as 2019 to add the phrase “text message” in a neighboring provision, ? 227(e)(8)(C), and chose to leave ? 227(c)(5) unamended. Radvansky, 3:23-cv-00214-LLM, slip op. at 6. This distinction leads the Court to presume that Congress intended ? 227(c)(5) to encompass only telephone calls because “when a statute uses one term in one place and a distinct term elsewhere, the difference matters—that is, the distinct words have different meanings.” Sunshine State Reg’l Ctr., Inc. v. Dir., U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., 143 F.4th 1331, 1344 (11th Cir. 2025) (citation modified)

The court goes on to respectfully disagree with courts in other circuits that have held otherwise:

Finally, the Court is not persuaded by the several district court decisions the Plaintiff provides concluding that “telephone call” in ? 227(c)(5) does include text messages because the reasoning underlying these decisions is inherently flawed. For example, in Alvarez v. Fiesta Nissan, Inc., 2026 WL 202930 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 26, 2026), the district court acknowledged that “no ordinary person would use the word ‘telephone call’ to refer to a text message” before concluding that “a usage which seems obvious now is not always a reflection of the original meaning of the statute,” even though text messages did not yet exist when the statute was originally enacted. Alvarez, 2026 WL 202930, at *4. In Wilson v. MEDVIDI Inc., 2025 WL 2856295, (N.D. Cal. Oct. 7, 2025), the district court reached beyond the statute’s plain text to find support for its conclusion in a 2024 edition of Black’s Law dictionary, which defies both the first rule of statutory interpretation and Loper Bright’s instruction that a statute’s meaning is fixed at the time of enactment. Wilson, 2025 WL 2856295, at *2; Young, 980 F.3d at 818-19; Loper Bright Enters., 603 U.S. at 400. And in Mujahid v. Newity, LLC, 2025 WL 3140725 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 10, 2025), the district court’s conclusion that “interpreting ? 227(c) to include text messages is consistent with the text of ? 227 as a whole” ignores the meaningful-variation canon—the idea that Congress must have intended distinct words in a statute to have different meanings. Mujahid, 2025 WL 3140725, at *2; Sunshine State Reg’l Ctr., Inc., 143 F.4th at 1344. Wilson v. Better Mortgage Corp., 2025 WL 3493815 (S.D.NY Dec. 5, 2025) applied similarly faulty reasoning.

Really a powerful ruling here—arguably the most assertive and firm to date.

We will continue to monitor these rulings as they come down.

In fact, our incredible associate Blake Landis will be providing a complete and comprehensive review of SMS TCPA rulings during his session at the Law Conference of Champions IV May 4-6, 2026 in Irvine, CA.