Frequently Asked Question
How do the filters work?
If you hover over the cute little filter icon, you'll see you have three options:
- Official only Selecting this option will narrow the stream to only tweets from accounts that are registered as belonging to the representative. This may include personal, official, staff, and campaign accounts.
- Official and Constituents GovLuv tracks who lives in which districts, so you can narrow the tweet stream to show the tweets from the representative accounts and from their constituents. This is exciting because - let's be honest - those are the people they REALLY care about it.
- Everyone You can probably figure out what this means, but just in case: if you select this option, it will show all tweets that are either to or from one of the registered twitter accounts for the representative.
Why aren't my representative(s) listed?
We draw all of the core information about representatives from the VoteSmart API. They have over 40,000 records for US representatives and I'm sure it's a chore to keep it all up to date. Search for your representatives on their website and see if you get a different response than you do from GovLuv. If so, let us know about @govluv. If not, give them a hand filling out the missing information.
Why do you want my full address?
Because electoral districts are not drawn in line with any other geographic division (zip codes, counties, etc.), we need your full address in order to locate you in the proper district. We then use your address for two reasons:
- So we can provide you with an accurate list of your representatives.
- So we can let your representatives know that you are a constituent of theirs. Your power to vote them in or out office is very real and makes your opinion stand out amongst all of the others on Twitter.
Where are the retweets?
Well, here's the deal. Twitter is about to change retweets forever. This may happen tomorrow (we hope). It may never happen (to judge from the last two months of expectant waiting). We expect it to happen soon though, so we haven't implemented retweet functionality until that gets settled.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
What's up with the color coding in the tweet stream?
We color code the tweetstream to make it easy for you to see who's important. Here's how it works:
- Backgrounds of official, office staff, and campaign staff for government representatives are a darker color in the tweetstream. This makes them easy to spot as you're scrolling through. The official account is the darkest, and the other two are a lighter shade of the background color.
- Image Outlines are different colors to delineate whether the person tweeting is a government representative or a constituent.
- Constituents in Pink.
- Federal government representatives in Blue.
- State government representatives in Green.
- Local government representatives in Orange.
It's all so beautiful!
