A few weeks ago, House majority leader Eric Cantor (R) revealed a new Facebook initiative called the Citizen Cosponsor Project. The app allows people to log in using their Facebook and follow legislation they are interested in (cosponsor a bill). By doing so, they receive first-hand information about a bill and get updates as the bill moves through the legislative process.
People are able to comment on the pending legislation and provide feedback on the bills they cosponsor. After cosponsoring a bill, you can share your bill with others from your Facebook profile.
The point of the app is to allow people to have a “dynamic communications platform that creates a more open, visible, and participatory legislative process. By cosponsoring, it is meant to create the feeling that you can actively participate with the House deliberation over legislation and take government action into your own hands. Initially, it makes sense. Social media has made it increasingly easy for us to communicate with one another. Why shouldn’t it be used to allow citizens to engage more with the policymakers whose actions directly affect their lives?
Although I ultimately decided not allow the app to access my profile information/post on my behalf, what I could access demonstrated an appeal that could certainly get a younger demographic involved in government, simply because it is on Facebook.
I quickly realized that there are more than a few questions that need to be answered, including just how much engagement is actually allowed and how much feedback is taken into account.
Updates: To begin, I am very curious to know where the legislative updates will be coming from. Will they be coming from Cantor’s Republican staff, a partisan perspective in general, or from a neutral standpoint that will provide objective progress on the legislation? The site will need to clarify this in order that the transparent first-hand information they are receiving is not actually filtered first-hand communication coming from a biased perspective.
Communication:
Cantor says that the site will also help citizens to communicate with their member of Congress through their feedback. How exactly will the app help assure citizens that their comments are actually reaching the House member that represents them and that their issues are accurately being advocated for?
Furthermore, will the Citizen Cosponsor Project provide a medium for people who disagree with the bill to also voice their opinions? Perhaps the app could also include a way to allow people that do not want to sponsor a bill to explain why. That could even help House members working on that particular bill to figure out alterations which could receive the support of the most amount of people.
Transparency: The site says that this new app will improve transparency, but I still have a few reservations about this. Although we cannot expect them to provide live updates with every progression of the bill, I doubt that the behind the scenes knowledge that the Citizen Cosponsor Project suggests that it is allowing citizens to access will be as informative as it suggests.
As with any new platform, the Citizen Cosponsor Project definitely has these issues (among others) to work out. Nevertheless, the premise of the app does seem like a great way to get citizens involved in their government through a medium they would use anyway.
These are all great concerns, and I have an additional one. I’m assuming that because in order to use this app Congress (or Cantor’s office) asks for profile information that they will create a demographic database from which to gauge how popular particular bills are among particular demographics. Every congressperson who is focused on reelection be it two years or six years out wants to know how their constituency feels about particular bills. I’ve often heard that good politicians know their constituencies really well. This may be to enable the politician to fight for whom they represent, but it might also mean that good politicians can play to their constituencies because the politicians know what their voters want. This Facebook app will enable even better information. It will track feelings on particular bills, as well as create a history for each of the app’s users so politicians can reference this as they look to future bills. If you’re ok with that, then this app is great!
Politics and social media seem like a great-mix. Especially in a democracy, like the United States, where the role of the citizen is supposed to be central to the functioning of government.
There is one problem, however, I’m not sure if Social Media can ever properly address – Information asymmetry. Politicians have access to much more information and resources than does the average citizen, so its difficult for me to envision a system where average citizens can give in-depth input into bills or legislation. Services like Wikipedia benefit mostly from the knowledge of highly-educated individuals who are specialists in a certain field – its awesome that these people can now be empowered to give input in policy where they couldn’t before.
However, I’m not sure if social media caters to a demographic of professionals or specialists. So, I wonder whether the quality of conversation or input on social-media based government programs will manage to affect a change.
Really interesting post, Dilan. I, like you, have a few reservations. The one thing I do find intriguing, however, is that one has to actively opt into the service. Thus, those who choose to follow the legislation in question are likely to be only those who will be truly interested. This should, to some degree, limit the informality of the service. Moreover, the project, with the two features that I deem most important–”View complete bill” and “View text of legislation (PDF)–should be lauded if only for the fact that it does provide a degree of transparency in that it offers direct access to the actual legislation through an accessible (Facebook) format. The rest to me is fluff.
Bottomline: I can now view pending legislation on Facebook, should I choose to. If the project did nothing else, I think this would be enough.
Facebook was started as a social networking tool. Now that online social networking has caught on, everyone wants a part of it. But how seriously do people take Facebook and things that are associated with it? This is not necessarily a view that I share, but I remember talking to Undergraduate Career Services about “BranchOut”, a competitor to LinkedIn that uses Facebook as its base, and she said that while she thought the idea was great, she wouldn’t trust it because Facebook was associated with informality. Does the same apply here? How legitimately are things like this taken given that they use Facebook as a platform?