Our commitments to you

Youth Town Hall is paid for by candidates' campaigns. These commitments are what their money cannot change. They are numbered so you — or a reporter, or a campaign — can hold us to them by number.

1. Your words are your words. Questions are published exactly as written or not at all. No one — not the campaign, not us — can edit a question.

2. Nothing publishes without a human. Every question is read and approved by a person before it appears. There are no comments, no votes, and no bots amplifying anything.

3. The campaign never gets your contact information. Not your email, not your phone, not your address — not during the town hall, not after. It cannot message you or add you to a list through this platform.

4. We never ask for your street address. The district check uses your city and ZIP, compared against public Census data on our own servers — no outside service sees it, and the ZIP itself is not kept. We test that no address field exists anywhere in our software, automatically, on every update. Your phone number is not requested either, and where a town hall uses phone verification it is never stored.

5. You appear as your first name, last initial, and town — or as Anonymous, if you prefer. Names are chosen by submitters, and choosing Anonymous means we never collect your name at all. Participation requires a working email, an 18–35 attestation, and a city and ZIP consistent with the district; Youth Town Hall does not verify identity, residency, or voter registration — and we say so on every page.

6. You can take your name off your words — instantly, at any time, forever. One click makes your question Anonymous, no justification required, including after it is answered; the question and answer stay. If your words themselves could identify you, ask us and we will remove the question entirely — granted generously exactly when the text could identify its author. You can also delete your information: your verification data goes immediately, your question text stays on the page as Anonymous unless you also have it removed. Questions never selected for an answer are deleted the day after election day, and whatever verification data remains is deleted on a published schedule after the town hall ends.

7. No ads, no trackers, no data sales. Town hall pages carry no advertising, no social-media pixels, and no third-party analytics. We never sell your data, and we share it with no one beyond the service providers named in our privacy policy (the companies that deliver our email and video player, and — only where a town hall uses phone verification — text codes; watching a video shares the same technical data with our video host that playing any web video does). Candidate videos play without ads or commentary, with captions and transcripts.

8. Questions that use someone else's name don't run. Questions that name, target, or claim to speak for another person are declined. If something slips through, a claim of impersonation is treated as an emergency: we unpublish first and review after.

9. Complaints come to us, not the campaign. Takedown requests go to the platform operator. We acknowledge within 24 hours and resolve within 72. The campaign is informed of outcomes — it has no veto.

10. Every candidate in a race gets the same deal. Same price, same terms, same offer, documented. The record for each race is public — see the symmetry report linked from every town hall page.

11. We show our numbers. Every town hall page displays how many questions were submitted and how many were answered.

12. We keep receipts. Every review and publishing decision is written to a permanent audit log, and this platform undergoes independent security review before serving real town halls.

Version 2, adopted 2026-08-15. Changes to these commitments are published as new numbered versions and prior versions remain available; we do not edit them silently. Version 1, adopted 2026-07-09, is preserved verbatim as commitments-v1.md in the site-copy folder of our public repository.