Published before the first post

How Town Hall is moderated.

A public, permanent, Google-indexed board about named public officials is powerful and risky in the same breath. So the rules are written down in the open, before a single board accepts a post — not improvised after the first crisis.

● Draft policy · finalized before Phase 5 launch

01Who can post

Reading is open to everyone — the public, the press, and the member's own staff. Posting is limited to verified constituents of the board's member: their state for a senator, their district for a representative. This single rule does most of the work. It reinforces the "constituent" promise and is the most effective defense against spam and coordinated brigading.

One verified person, one account. Identity is name-linked, not anonymous.
Verification is required before your first post, and re-checked if your registration changes.
House-district verification is stricter than a ZIP guess, because roughly a third of ZIP codes straddle more than one district. We won't badge someone a constituent unless we can actually place them.

02What belongs here

Town Hall is for holding an office accountable, in public. Aim at the record and the role.

Criticism of votes, bills, public statements, missed votes, and constituent service.
Questions the member's office should answer, and follow-ups when they don't.
Sourced claims, receipts, and links to the official record.

03What gets removed

A small set of hard lines, applied to everyone regardless of party or popularity.

Threats, incitement, or calls for violence against anyone.
Targeting a person's family, home address, or personal safety (doxxing).
Harassment, slurs, and content targeting protected groups.
Knowingly false statements of fact presented as truth, and impersonation.
Spam, coordinated inauthentic activity, and vote manipulation.

Sharp, angry, and unflattering is fine — that's the point of a town hall. Illegal and abusive is not.

04Permanence vs. removal

The brand promise is that the receipts don't disappear. Moderation requires that some posts do come down. We resolve that tension out loud rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

Removed doesn't mean vanished

Permanence is a promise not to memory-hole legitimate criticism — it is not a promise to host content that breaks the rules. When a post is removed, its permanent URL returns a visible tombstone naming the reason ("removed for a violation of §03: doxxing"), instead of silently disappearing. The moderation itself stays on the record.

05How moderation runs

A realistic stack for a small, citizen-funded team, layered so volume stays manageable:

Automated filtering catches the obvious — spam, slurs, threats — at the moment of posting.
Community flagging lets readers surface what filters miss.
A human backstop reviews the flag queue. Verified-constituent gating keeps that queue small enough for people to actually read.

06Appeals

If your post is removed, you'll be told which rule it broke and you can appeal. Removals are logged with a reason and a timestamp, so decisions can be reviewed and — where we got it wrong — reversed. Members and their staff can report content, but get no special power to delete criticism of themselves.

This is a living document

This policy is published in draft while the boards are still closed, so it can be pressure-tested in public before anyone posts. It will be finalized — and dated — before Phase 5 opens, and changes will be shown in the open, not quietly edited in.

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