Content policy

Youth Town Hall publishes a curated record of constituent questions and candidate answers. These rules protect that record without pretending the platform is an open forum.

Questions people may submit

Questions must be plain text, 10 to 500 characters, and contain no links or attachments. They should ask the candidate about the office, district, public record, proposals, or issues the candidate could address in office.

  • Keep it to a question. This is a venue for questions and recorded answers, not comments, endorsements, advertisements, or campaign organizing.
  • Use your own words. A question may not name, target, or claim to speak for another private person.
  • Do not submit abuse. Threats, harassment, doxxing, unlawful material, spam, and attempts to evade the verification or submission rules are not accepted.
  • Duplicates may be grouped. Substantially similar questions may be linked so the public page can say that other people asked something similar without rewriting anyone's words.

Curation and candidate speech

The candidate's campaign reads the submissions and chooses which questions the candidate will answer. Youth Town Hall does not represent that selection as neutral moderation: the campaign curates its own town hall. A selected question publishes exactly as submitted or not at all. Curators cannot edit, trim, or rewrite it.

The candidate decides how to answer and how long the answer will be. Published answers are the candidate's own recorded speech. Youth Town Hall adds captions and a transcript; it does not add commentary, endorsements, reaction clips, or advertising.

A campaign may also answer questions the candidate has heard elsewhere — in person, by email, on social media — in a clearly separate section labeled From the trail. Trail questions are labeled by how they arrived, are never mixed into the list of questions asked here, and are never counted in the page's submitted-and-answered numbers.

Review outcomes

Questions may be declined when they are off-topic, duplicative, abusive, about a third party, outside the office's scope, or otherwise inconsistent with this policy. Decline categories support the curation process and aggregate reporting; they are not published with a submitter's question.

Removal and complaints

A submitter may make their own question anonymous at any time, including after publication, without giving a reason — instantly and permanently; the question and its answer remain. A submitter whose wording could identify them may additionally request full removal of the question, and such requests are granted generously exactly when the text is self-identifying. Third-party complaints about published material go to the Youth Town Hall platform operator, and content is removed where the published policy warrants it. Claims of impersonation or the naming of a private person receive priority review. The campaign is informed of outcomes but does not control the decision.

The operator acknowledges a report within 24 hours and targets resolution within 72 hours. Those service levels remain subject to the final counsel review identified in the project specifications.