Memorandum
- From
- Delaney Sawyer via Fast Company
- Date
- Filed
- Society·5 min to read
- Re
Rebuilds Platform to Turn Local Complaints Into Political Action
ReRebuilds Platform to Turn Local Complaints Into Political Action
is investing about $100 million to rebuild its platform with AI tools that help users turn social media complaints into local petitions, verify constituents, and connect with decision-makers. New president Steve Dziedzic says the shift to a local focus aims to address the feeling that people are unheard in democracy.
is betting that the path to restoring faith in democracy runs through city hall, not Washington. The petition platform, founded in 2007 and best known for viral national campaigns, has spent the past two years rebuilding its tools around a new priority: helping ordinary people turn local frustrations into concrete political action. The organization is investing roughly $100 million in the redesign and new artificial intelligence features, and on Monday it named Steve Dziedzic, who has led the product overhaul, as its new president.
The shift reflects a stark problem. More than 80% of Americans do not believe their elected officials care what they have to say, according to the organization. «The core problem we’re trying to solve is that people just feel unheard,» Dziedzic said. «They don’t think their voice matters anymore in our democracy.» The platform’s answer is what Dziedzic calls «an explicit local focus» — a significant change for a company whose most famous petition, a 2020 call for justice for George Floyd, gathered nearly 20 million signatures.
There are practical reasons for the local turn. People care most about issues close to home, and local petitions are the most likely to succeed. Even those who want to tackle national problems like gun control are better off starting with a local law and expanding from there, Dziedzic said. The new tools are designed to give those efforts a better chance. An AI «petition writer» asks users for their story and then helps combine it with a logical argument aimed at a mayor or other local decision-maker. If someone has already posted a rant on TikTok, they can paste a link and the tool will draft a petition automatically. The platform also scans social media for complaints that could become successful campaigns and invites those users to participate.
is also trying to solve a credibility problem for local officials. A mayor cannot tell how many people liking a TikTok post are actually constituents, Dziedzic noted. The platform now uses addresses to verify signers, giving officials a clearer signal of when they need to pay attention. After a petition is created, the site suggests related subreddits, Facebook groups, and other online spaces where people have rallied around similar issues, a feature Dziedzic said increases signatures by about 20%. «Unless you have at least 100 signatures, it’s just really not going to matter to the mayor, unfortunately — they need to know that there’s a nontrivial amount of constituents who care about this,» he said.
The platform goes beyond signatures. It helps petitioners identify the right decision-maker to target, whether the issue involves a park or a proposed data center, and then tries to broker a meeting. It informs users of upcoming city council meetings and lets them invite everyone who signed to attend. «It’s starting digitally, but then it ends up in the physical world, helping shape real community,» Dziedzic said. The site also assists with pitching local media, another lever for getting officials’ attention.
Early results suggest the approach can work. In one recent campaign that began as a TikTok video, a Maryland resident created a petition asking the county for a moratorium on new development until residents had more data about the impacts. More than 10,000 people signed, and the moratorium is now in place. So far this year, the platform has hosted more than 1,800 petitions about data centers, drawing more than 3 million signatures. Other users have recently employed the platform to remove Flock cameras, make intersections safer, and fight a $3,332 electric bill.
Critics have long dismissed petitions as «slacktivism,» and some studies have suggested that signing one can make people less likely to take other meaningful actions. Dziedzic argues the new structure is built to nudge users toward further engagement. Longer term, he said, the company wants to help society make wise decisions, which could eventually mean helping decision-makers hear from people on both sides of an issue rather than only from the petition starter. For now, the focus is simpler. «People want to be able to shape their communities, where their loved ones are, where they do life,» Dziedzic said. «By helping people shape their communities in connection with their elected officials, we think that is the shot — that’s my biggest hypothesis for people believing their voice matters again.»
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