AskNot

About AskNot

Liberals and progressives are notoriously bad at messaging. This very simple app seeks to change that.

We give you 3 to 5 curated tweets every few days which exemplify effective liberal messaging for you to retweet and spread the word. We'll notify you when they're ready, and all you have to do is go through and press the retweet button and you'll be contributing to the cause!

During the last election, the top 20 most prolific accounts on Twitter supported Trump (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-a-conservative-twitter-user-sleeps-his-account-is-hard-at-work/2017/02/05/18d5a532-df31-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html), and many of those accounts were bots. To overcome them, we as progressives need to build up a grassroots army of everyday people to get our message to the public. And it can't be any message – it has to be one that rings true and communicates our vision for the country provocatively. We must *change* minds, not just acknowledge differences of opinion.

This app is designed very simply, in recognition of the fact that many of us have responsibilities that keep us from attending every march and contacting every congressman. Instead, we pick the best articulations of our stances, and all you have to do is press a button to amplify them. These curated tweets are carefully chosen to maximize effectiveness by reframing the conversation. We don't try to battle conservatives on their own ground, using the frames they've constructed to give them the upper hand – we use liberal frames based on our values to change the way people look at the issue. That is our goal: to change people's minds, and give you the right points to do so in your everyday life.

(A good example of reframing came with the battle over gay marriage – "Defend Traditional Marriage" is a conservative frame, while "Love Is Love" is a liberal one. Progressives won that battle because we were able to change people's minds by proposing that gay people should of course be allowed to love whomever they please, rather than trying to convince people that gay marriage is not a threat to 'traditional' marriage. Doing the latter would have put liberals at a disadvantage because simply negating a frame doesn't change the conversation and keeps people thinking in that frame, whereas the former becomes a matter of human rights and decency, and puts conservatives in a position of negating our frame. It's a subtle point, and doing it well is hard – which is why this app exists.)

A note about privacy: we don't store your twitter handle. We aren't collecting data about you. For now, this is a completely free app. We may eventually ask for voluntary support from our users to keep us going, but we won't force you to pay, and we're not going to try to monetize the data. This is a passion project, and we don't want this to go against the very values we're trying to spread. We don't have a privacy policy because we can't afford lawyers, but we're committed to keeping this as privacy-respecting as possible.

For now, we're just doing retweets, but in the future, we'll be giving you other simple actions you can take to change American politics towards a more liberal direction. Let's move the country in the direction of compassion, justice, freedom, and fairness!