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Facebook Launches 'Town Hall' For Contacting Government Reps, Adds Local Election Reminders (techcrunch.com)
Facebook has officially launched their "Town Hall" feature that allows users to locate, follow and contact their local, state and federal government representatives. The social media company also announced that they will be launching local election reminders in an effort to get more users to vote in state, county, and municipal elections. TechCrunch reports: The feature was recently made available in the "More" menu on mobile and on desktop to a subset of users. When you launch it, you would be presented with a list of reps at the local, state and federal level, and you could click to visit their Facebook page or send them a message, call them, or email. Not all reps offer their contact information via Facebook, however. And Facebook doesn't yet pull in the missing phone numbers or emails from off-site sources, like official government websites, for example. The company tell us that's something it wants to address in time, though. Today, Town Hall is available to all U.S. Facebook users and some of its features will now be integrated in the News Feed. If you like or comment on a post made by one of your elected officials, a new feature below the comments will invite you to call, message or email the rep. After doing so, users will then be prompted to share a post saying that they contacted the rep, as a means of encouraging their friends to do the same. Facebook says that this Contact Your Rep post is not shown to everyone, but only to those who are also already engaging with an elected official's post, through a like or comment. Additionally, Facebook says it will now offer Election Reminders for local elections. The new, local election reminders will appear for all state, county, and municipal elections in the U.S. in areas with a population of over 10,000 people, and will include both primaries and general elections.
I just went there to check it out. In order to see anything beyond your Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Senators and President, you have to enter your home address. This is just an attempt by Facebook to get you to reveal this information. They use the same technique to try to get your phone number.
Sorry, Facebook, I don't want to give you that information. Instead, I should just be able to type in a zip code or state legislative district. But it doesn't work that way.
Nice try, Facebook, but no dice.
It is bad enough people use facebook, but making it an official channel for government/citizen contact.... Terrible, just terrible. Imagine Facebook snooping even deeper into the affairs of the citizenry. I would like to have FB outlawed as a media through which government was allowed to conduct any business. All government business should happen over extremely secure and non commercial channels and through open technologies