Facebook Badges – Let your Politicians Know Who You Are?

The famous social network, Facebook introduced three new features that are meant to help elected politicians to connect with their constituents in a better way than before. The features provide a way to politicians to identify their voters and find issues that are affecting their elected district. The news is brought to you by a professional website design agency in Dubai, Branex.

These features are the latest round of public engagement features that Facebook added over the past few months. As part of the effort, the social media initially introduced Town Hall in March to help people discover their local politicians and contact them privately. Another similar feature that was added last month was a button, to contact local representatives within Facebook posts.

These products are directly in line with Mark Zuckerberg’s big mission for his company for the coming year. FB’s tagline is no more “connecting the world”, but it is a matter of building communities now. The CEO’s 6,000 world manifesto released earlier this year which was entirely focused on community building, similar to his speech at Harvard commencement in May.

“Our goal is to help people build the communities they want by making it easier for them to engage and have a voice in government – on a daily basis, not just Election Day,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement about the updates.

One of the new feature is voter badges. Facebook users can now opt in for a tag that will identify them as living in an elected official’s district, if they interact with anything shared by that elected local official. Facebook users will be asked to turn it on if they like, comment, or share a post of their elected official as long as they identify these officials within the Town Hall feature.

When this option is on, all the comments that are made at that moment or earlier by the users on the identified official’s post, will be showed with the voter’s badge. Beyond badges, Facebook is also adding constituent insights where users will be able to discover more stories that are related to their district. This feature is available to both voters and to the elected officials so that the officials can see what stories are buzzing in their districts. All these insights will be fully automated, so there remain no chance of any human molding any of the news stories to show. For elected officials, this feature is available in the Page Insights section of their Facebook Page. Page administrations will see a horizontal scroll of popular stories shared in their district.

For constituents, they can see the trending stories in a Community Tab on the elected official’s Facebook Page. Facebook is also introducing district targeting, where elected officials can choose for their posts to only appear in the News Feeds of people who are likely to be their constituents. They can also run polls to this same group of people.
When it comes to connecting with local politicians, Zuckerberg is doing his fair share. His New Years Resolution is to visit every state in America, where he is also connecting with politicians IRL. For example, he met Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and live-streamed their conversation with Facebook Live.

Zuckerberg is also hosting Facebook’s first-ever Communities Summit later this month, where hundreds of administrators of Facebook Groups are invited.

“For the past decade, Facebook has been focused on making the world more open and connected — and we’re always going to keep doing that. But now it’s clear we have to do more. We also need to bring people closer together and build common understanding,” Zuckerberg wrote Tuesday in a Facebook post about the Communities Summit.