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.

Comments

Ulterior motive

[Lordpidey]

I worry that facebook will use this to try to manipulate elections, by encouraging only people who are likely to vote for X party to vote. Or at least having the feature shown stronger to certain groups.

Re:Ulterior motive

[_Sharp'r_]

And if Facebook knows what issues you care about and what parties/politicians you support, they can easily put all that together in order to sell political advertising campaigns targeting you to specific politicians and give them the specific issues to put in the campaign.

So really, this is about Facebook improving their product (you) for their advertisers (political buyers, in this case). Happy data collection. I'm sure Google and the other big advertising companies will follow suit if they can.

The fact they can get additional less informed voters (those who don't vote currently are on average less informed than those who do vote) to show up at elections (which will make the average voter knowledge lower) is just the bonus cherry on top of their advertising Sundae. But hey, as long as that gets them more advertising money to propagandize those less informed voters, it's all good, right?