Unlike the government, which some criticize as an inefficient behemoth and others praise as an inefficient behemoth by design, Facebook's new Town Hall feature is streamlined and devoid of controversy: it simply tells you the two most crucial bits of information for civic participation: who your elected officials are, and when you need to vote.
Launched on Monday, the Town Hall site is integrated into Facebook's main desktop site. Upon visiting for the first time, you'll be greeted with a prompt to enter your physical address if you don't already have it saved to your profile. Facebook assures that it will not display the address publically.
Once it knows where you live, Town Hall offers a list of your local, state, and federal elected officials. Next to each one is a contact button that launches a pop-up with a mailing address, a phone number, and an email link. Of course, nearly all elected officials are already on Facebook, so the pop-up also has a button to start a Messenger conversation with the politician. There's also a "follow" link next to each person's name in the list.
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Next to the list of officials is a settings pane with Town Hall's only configurable option: to toggle reminders about upcoming elections on or off. So even if Town Hall doesn't encourage you to proactively get in touch with any of your elected officials, at least you'll be alerted when democracy needs you.
There is one small but glaring caveat about Town Hall, however. Facebook may have launched it to improve civic participation, but it is self-promotional, too: it searches for officials based on their Facebook pages, and there's no one-click way to find out if your representative isn't on Facebook.
As with all things in the social media world, Town Hall is a work in progress. In a post on Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Town Hall was starting to roll out across the US, and that his company is "increasingly focused" on helping its users engage in politics.
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