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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 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.
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
do you really think having fewer easily misled/dimwitted/single-issue voters participating in politics would make things worse?
Well if enough of them had come out to vote Hillary would have been president for starters. We'd be eating the last of the canned beans in the shelters about now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We should be grateful that you're at least honest in your desire to disenfranchise Democratic voters - Republican politicians aren't as candid, instead opting to blame non-existent polling day voter fraud or "lack of demand" in Democratic districts.
I see from your other post you think reminding people to vote is "socialism" - I hope you don't make use of publicly funded roads, bridges, hospitals, schools or the internet, all of which are cornerstones of socialism.
The stupidity of the alt-right never ceases to amaze. They post rants railing against socialism on the *internet*...which was designed and built by government, paid for by tax dollars. They also worship the military, but can't seem to comprehend that a publicly funded military where everybody gets "coverage" is socialist.
Is it any wonder these people are shooting up pizza parlours?
Ironically it'll be the EU who kick up a fuss about Facebook trying to harvest addresses, if they ever roll out election reminders in Europe. As you said, there's no reason why you couldn't simply enter a ZIP code which FB uses to determine which voting district you're in, with the possibility of manual override if you think you're wrong.
It's not like they need your address anyway. They can already geolocate people on Android/iOS clients via GPS, and even without GPS they can fix your location to within a few miles using your IP address. The home address is useless to FB itself (what are they going to do, send you spam in the mail?) but I'm sure it'd be of interest to FB's advertising partners...
Facebook and Google already did that, trying to censor Republican concerns and promoting Hillary and the Progressive movement. I have zero faith that they will change their behavior, and believe they are part of the same leftist agenda as most media in the US.
I'll also add that today most young people are not taught about the US Constitution or History in general that does not favor progressivism. They are not trained in rhetoric, and not trained in the Socratic method. (You may be, but the generalization is correct that a large percentage is not). This means that they fall prey to propaganda much easier than someone older who has some ability to recognize and ignore the propaganda. The least educated among us are not necessarily the best people to vote. Those type of person vote one way, and it is never Conservative/Republican.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This is absolutely fabulous! Yet another way for our unelected officials to totally ignore the electorate!
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I just entered my zip code and it accepted that. Of course that may give you a couple extraneous representatives, since zips don't exactly correspond to legislative boundaries.
Well, it had to come, didn't? Government as a Service.
come on mark, when can we vote online, you know, not having to leave my house, fight traffic, find a parking space, then...stand in line, smile like i really want to be here and have to actually talk to ID10Ts...this is the 21st Century and everyone lives online. don't cop out by saying it is a $ issue or and for the good of our online security, we save that for gov't people who don't care so they can use the excuse and get away with it. you and trump need to do lunch and leave fb out of it.
I half-agree. Voting should take effort, because it's valuable and while people value convenience they don't value things that are. Our elected representatives, on the other hand, are our employees and at the top of their job description is availability and responsiveness.
Well, elected representatives need to be available to their constituents,and that communication is inherently public. If representatives were only going to communinicate via facebook, that would be an issue, but making facebook one of the hundred other ways the people we elect interact with us, I don't see a problem. They're still going to take calls, letters, emails, read tweets, physically attend public forums, have office hours, live amongst their constituents, etc.
If you point out facts that harm leftism, you can only be a troll. The left is the group attempting to silence and censor speech. Please continue to prove the point so that your ideology dies a horrific death.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Last year FB was caught red-handed censoring political news. They can no longer be trusted with political matters (or any news for that matter) and I have no intention of using any of their political features. What is to stop FB from disabling "town hall" notices from FB members affiliated with the political opposition? The liberals have gone too far in infiltrating news outlets, social media, "fact checkers", and other internet resources as well as rigging the elections. This chicanery must end.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
0. Promote political articles to your feed based on 'criteria'.
1. Censor or demote (or delete) political articles based on content and decisions (aka someone's ideology).
2. Offer a link to elected representatives to react based on promoted or censored articles, though not on deleted articles.
3. Profit!
What could be wrong with any of this?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Or we'd have CNN claiming that Putin was hacking Democracy again.
Elucidate, I'm interested in the downside...
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