Be Heard: Contact Your Reps 4+

EPluribus was a great app....Now along comes a verification app. Now when you contact your reps, you get no indication that your message was sent, unless you have the other app, just a notification, (that you can’t ckesr) that “you may be drowned out by bots”. You already have my info for ePluribus, why do I need another app?????😡😡😡

(8/21/19) Hi Gilty1, I’m going to keep checking in. I just want to make sure what I said makes sense and hear from you if there’s anything else we can improve about the app. Could you please let me know?

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(8/4/9) Hello again! Checking in again. Could you let me know get a chance to read my previous reply?

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(6/18/19) Hi again Gilty1, could you let us know if this makes sense? Or how we can make it clearer within the app? We’d love to hear back from you.

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Hello, just wanted to check in. Does it make sense why we made a separate app for verification? Sorry again for the confusion. We’re working on making it clearer within the app. We’d love any further feedback you have.

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The reason the verification functionality is in a separate app is that many other civic tech tools have asked us for the same functionality. As you can imagine, they want to let their users prove they’re constituents so they can stand out from bot messages. By having a separate app for verification, we can support more than just ePluribus. Our hope is to help the entire civic tech ecosystem prevent bots and fake accounts from meddling.

You can clear the warning popup you described by clicking the “Send as unverified” button, which sends the message just like before we had the verification app. We just warn you because we know reps will be more likely to prioritize your message if you prove you’re a constituent, not a bot.

Bot messages are an extremely serious problem. For example: when the FCC had a public comment period about net neutrality, it received 21.7 million messages. But independent research (from Pew, the Wall Street Journal, and others) showed that 94% of those messages were fake or duplicate, sent from extremely sophisticated bot accounts. It’s this sort of troubling interference in our politics that the verification app is designed to help solve. If you verify, we tell your reps that you’ve proven you’re a constituent, so they can have confidence your message is real.

Lastly, we want to emphasize that with the verification app (Unum ID) we store literally zero personal data. We don’t even have a database. That’s because all the app is supposed to do is help users of ePluribus and other civic tech applications stand out from fake messages. There’s no need whatsoever to store your data in order to do that. In this age of data breaches, we’ve decided to use a completely different paradigm, one without ANY central storage of personal data, one with total user privacy and security.

My apologies that we didn’t make these points clear. We’re working to improve the design of the app to explain everything better. Thank you so much for being engaged and contacting your reps. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to email the founders directly at Liam.McCarty@ePluribus.io and Aidan.McCarty@ePluribus.io.

This app is simple, but very convenient. I love that I can contact any of my representatives quickly whenever I want. Yes, you do have to install a verification app, but at least this way my representatives always know that I’m an actual constituent and can thus prioritize my remarks above those of the average individual. I highly recommend this app.

We’re thrilled you’re liking the app :) Thank you again for the feedback (it’s how we improve!)

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Hello, checking in again. Were you able to try the app again? We think everything’s working well, but we’d love to hear if it is on your end. Thanks!

Just wanted to check in, is everything working well again? We did lots of testing on our end and didn’t see anything wrong, but we want to make sure we didn’t miss anything!

UPDATE: We just launched the new version, and it should fix the problem you had. (It also has an exciting new identity verification feature so you can prove to your reps you're a constituent!) Please let us know if anything doesn't work. Sorry again for the trouble, and thanks so much for using ePluribus.

Our apologies for this issue! We're about to launch a new version that will fix the problem and will let you know as soon as we do. Thanks so much for contacting your reps :)

Great app, the ease with which to contact your elected officials this app makes possible is great. I’ve noticed with the latest update that autocorrect doesn’t work, so I have to go back and edit. Besides that seamless essential app!

(8/21/19) Hi again yeycub, could you let me know if it’s working properly now?

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(8/4/19) Hi yeycub, is autocorrect working for you now? Please let me know if not! Want to make sure we fix any bugs

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UPDATE 2: Hi again, we just launched an update that fixes this issue! Autocorrect now works in the message field, so your typing will be much easier :) Thank you for your patience

UPDATE: We've officially added this to our list for the next app release, which we plan to have out no later than a couple weeks from now. Thanks for your patience on this -- we'll get it fixed!

Our apologies, we didn't intend for autocorrect to stop working! We'll look into what caused this right away and let you know when we've fixed it. Thanks for using ePluribus :)