Facebook Has Launched A Politics Feature That People Are Calling Revolutionary

It shouldn’t come as a surprise for a social network that was initially designed to rank hot chicks at uni, but Facebook has a complicated relationship with politics.

Over the past few years especially, the social media juggernaut has cannibalised and transformed an enormous section of the news media. It’s changed how people understand concepts of journalism and truth. It’s fostered a kind of broad performative identity and activism, and increased communication around the world. It’s fundamentally changed how people interact with one another and how they understand and engage with the views of others.

Basically, it’s done a hell of a lot in a bizarrely short time.

As a result of all this (and the public pressure that comes with it) the company’s now making a conscious effort to address its civic responsibility. Today, Facebook has rolled out a new feature called Town Hall that enables users to more easily contact their local representatives. In a statement this morning, Mark Zuckerberg said he aimed to “build a civically-engaged community [by] building new tools to help people engage in a thoughtful and informed way”.

“The starting point is knowing who represents you and how you can make your voice heard on the decisions that affect your life. The more you engage with the political process, the more you can ensure it reflects your values. This is an important part of feeling connected to your community and your democracy, and it’s something we’re increasingly focused on at Facebook.”

The feature has only been rolled out in the US this morning but the reaction has been incredibly positive. First reports have said it “could revolutionise politics” and is “probably the best thing the social network has ever done”.

The gist is this: ‘Town Hall’ is a tab on Facebook in the same style as ‘Events’ or ‘Friends’. Once you click on it and enter your address or region, you’ll get a full list of all your local representatives and their contact info. That will then be incorporated into your News Feed too. If your local rep posts on Facebook, you’ll be presented with an option to call their office about the issue they’re raising.

Town Hall also comes with notifications about local elections. If introduced in Australia, that could be a very handy way of a) getting young people more involved in local representation, and b) avoiding that annoying fine because you lost/forgot about the hard copy notice you got in the mail three weeks prior.

We don’t yet know whether this feature will be heading for Australia, but the US should be an interesting case study to learn from. Time will tell whether the increase in civic engagement is worth the presumably MASSIVE increase in prank calls to local politicians.