Original Social Media Content as a Tool to Speak Directly to Your Government Representatives

Please join this grand experiment to see if we can flip social media on its head, so that instead of officeholders talking to us, we start talking to them.

Dec 06, 2024

Tell the World What You Want

Social Media is the medium of communication in 2024, and will be for the foreseeable future. Every officeholder and every candidate for office has multiple social media accounts to speak directly to the constituents of their district.

A brief survey of politicians use of social media shows that the content they aim at us is by and large cheerleading with almost no discussion of policy. You will learn that your representative handed out Thanksgiving turkeys, presented commendations to the local bakery and stood hand-in-hand with a local constituent in need.

You will not learn your representative’s position on the budget, on police and justice, on homelessness, on housing or any number of the real issues you sent them to office to tackle.

Our representatives do this because we do not expect any more from them. More importantly, we do not participate every day in our participatory representative democracy. This is true at every level of government—local, state and federal.

Who does participate in government every day? The ultra wealthy who pay to have lobbyists attend every commission meeting, every committee meeting, every council meeting and every social engagement where your representative lurks. While you and I are at work, the people with money, via their paid lobbyists, grab the ears of our elected officials. When it is time to vote, our representatives vote for the people who grabbed their ear, not you and me.

This has been a structural defect, to the benefit of the moneyed class, of our participatory representative democracy since the beginning. However, now, we have a tool in social media, if we choose to use it, to be in the ear of our representatives every day.

In politics, the squeaky wheel get the grease. By creating our own content targeted and tagged directly to our representatives, all of us can start to squeak louder than the paid lobbyists of the ultra wealthy.

If you have enough time in your day to post about the random events in your life, to comment on the latest movie, or to blast your least favorite politician on a pundit’s feed, then you have enough time to advocate for yourself on social media directly to your representatives. Stop complaining. Start acting!

The Experiment Starts in Los Angeles (Or Wherever You Are)

I am starting this experiment locally. I will be making content directed and tagged to the appropriate representative or representatives that advocates for the positions I believe will solve the most important issues facing the City of Los Angeles. My policy positions for which you will see content include, but are not limited to:

Upzone the 74% of Los Angeles residential areas currently zoned exclusively for single-family housing to multi-family housing zones
Turn Los Angeles into the most residential development friendly city in the country with a Build! Build! Build! attitude
Replace homeless services with direct cash payments to the homeless, along with providing the homeless free medical care in coordination with Los Angeles County that includes therapy and drugs to treat their PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD/ADD and schizophrenia
Expand the size of the City Council from 15 districts to 45 districts

This list is to inspire you to create your own content and to speak out. You can copy what resonates with you. You can and should make your own. You can argue against me position-by-position and tag your representative directly!

If you are in the City of Los Angeles, I have researched the social media handles of all 18 elected officeholders. Please use this cheat sheet, Los Angeles City Elected Officials Social Media and More, to find the social media handles for the representatives you want to mention and tag in your content.

This experiment is not for me to get the policy results I want. This experiment is to create a true civic engagement at every level of government, so that representative majorities of citizens are able to realize the policies we all want.

Leading by Example

Here are the links to my first social media content where I tag or mention a Los Angeles elected official in order to make a direct appeal.

The videos are thanking Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez for her support of amending the CHIP Ordinance to include Exhibit D, Option 1 to add single family zones to the AHIP and MIIP programs, effectively upzoning the whole city. My specific request is for Councilmember Hernandez to now lead her colleagues to support her position when the CHIP Ordinance comes before the full Council in the coming weeks, as well as to create a constituent movement to help support her.

Now it is your turn! Be heard!

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