With WriteToThem.com we want to run a service that helps people write the right message to the right place. That means helping users express themselves effectively and keeping the service a constructive channel between constituents and representatives by deterring abusive messages.

Abuse and intimidation aimed at elected representatives does not just harm the person receiving it. It corrodes the openness and trust that democratic culture needs, and it can deter people (especially those from under-represented groups) from taking part in public life at all. 

We think we’re in a good position to play a constructive role in this area. One problem that has been raised is frustration at bouncing around layers of government, where a key benefit of WriteToThem is getting people to the right layer first. But we need to go further than that to understand how we can discourage abusive messages – both to directly implement approaches, and to trial patterns that could be implemented by a wider range of parliaments and local authorities.

We’ve been exploring what a “toxicity” risk score would look like in our infrastructure and have released a report of our findings so far. We trialled a range of options — from baseline keyword matching, to Google’s Perspective API, to running lightweight models locally (IBM Granite Guardian), and then to LLM-based grading as a second pass for tricky cases like implicit threats or messages quoting abuse from third parties.

But having a risk score is less important than how it is used. We’ve mapped out a few different approaches beyond a manual moderation approach – such as soft “nudge” prompts (encouraging people to reconsider wording before sending), cool-down delays for higher-risk messages (without removing someone’s ability to contact their representative), and informative flags for recipients (for example, passing along a risk score or relevant metadata on a message).

Our next step has mapped out some technical possibilities to talk to more people about which approaches make sense  – which we’ll be doing as part of our wider Welsh Government funded democratic engagement work to improve WriteToThem.

For more details on the approaches tested, potential issues with different methods of implementation, and unanswered questions, you can read the report online.

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Image: Pawel Czerwinski