Show HN: An easy way to tweet your senators | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An easy way to tweet your senators

10 pointsbmelton7 comments

I built a quick and dirty MVP app to tweet your Senators efficiently. I mostly did this so that we could minimize the friction on opposing CISPA which has not yet been heard in the Senate.

I know I still have to add the House, but mining all their Twitter accounts is going to take longer, and with CISPA's day in Senate so near, I didn't want to delay.

http://tweetasenator.com/

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I don't mean this as criticism of OP's work, but if you want to influence your representatives you're better off calling their office or sending snail mail (postmarks show that you're a real constituent).

You're right, and this is of course meant to supplement those efforts, but as a political activist, I've noticed more and more delegates and senators, at both the state and federal level, relying more and more on Twitter. If there's any traction at all, the next steps are to add the House members, and also allow for emailing at the same time.

What I've found is that on hot-button issues, like gun control, CISPA, gay marriage, etc., the majority of your emails are ignored, and are just parsed for whether or not it is 'for' or 'against' a given bill. Twitter allows for an easier aggregation of that sort of content than email does, and forces us citizens to keep the message short and on point.

Namely, this is meant to address the audience that doesn't know who their elected officials are, and give them an easy way to voice that opinion.

Thanks for the comment.

>sending snail mail (postmarks show that you're a real constituent).

The people I know who have worked for US senators strongly disagree with writing letters. For one thing, there is generally a two week delay, so if you're writing about that upcoming vote there is a timing problem. They recommend phone calls.

Not necessarily. For example, I believe a big enough social media campaign could have convinced Dennis Kucinich to relocate to Washington State and become a rep there, instead of staying in Ohio and eventually losing his seat. (Of course, that never happened, and I never finished my version of what the OP made (which was basically Tweet-A-Senator, but you could only tweet Dennis Kucinich....)).

I think twitter can be used in innovative, non-traditional ways to influence politicians. #Benghazi, anyone?

Why is the background picture a church?

[Also this is really cool, see my other comment on this thread]

It was the most content-generic palette background that was usable via a Creative Commons license that I found when doing a search for 'Congress' on Flickr.

I understood that it wasn't the Congressional building, but I didn't know what it was, and if it's a church, I didn't know that. :-\

Thanks for the praise. I fully recognize that the implementation is mediocre at best, but it was a rush job.

Clickable: http://tweetasenator.com/

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