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

Understanding more about constituent communication

We’ve released a new report exploring insights from WriteToThem about the content of constituent communication – you can read the whole report online or a summary below. 

WriteToThem.com is a long-running mySociety service that enables people across the UK to contact their elected representatives by entering their postcode and sending a message through the site.

This service provides a unique opportunity to understand the flow of communication between many constituents and many representatives. Our WriteToThem Insights report uses surveys to understand more about what people are writing about. 

 While previous work identified patterns in response rates and deprivation gradients, this experiment focuses on understanding what people are writing about, distinguishing between casework (individual problem-solving) and campaigning (policy-oriented advocacy).

A new survey and data-processing pipeline were developed to categorise and anonymise message summaries, applying machine learning and large language model techniques to cluster and label topics. Analysis of 5,400 messages from Q3 2025 found:

• Casework and campaigning form two distinct types of communication, with casework more common for councillors and campaigning dominant for MPs.
• The deprivation gradients of these two types differ sharply: campaigning is concentrated in less deprived areas, while casework is more evenly distributed, though likely still underrepresents the most deprived groups.
• First-time users are more likely to send casework messages and to receive responses.
• Top themes in casework include housing, local services, health, and anti-social behaviour; in campaigning, issues such as Gaza, climate policy, and digital ID predominate.

This data has limits. This covers only a portion of total correspondence, and with little information about whether the sample is representative enough to generalise to messages sent in general. That said, we think there are strong uses both for improving WriteToThem itself and for informing broader understanding of constituent communication.

We want to build on this work: refining the analysis process and exploring opportunities to collaborate. We see particular value in digging more into casework data as something that could inform more systematic approaches in this area, helping representatives across the country join up information and improve collective scrutiny of government services.

The full report can be read here.

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Image: Christopher Burns