Frequently asked questions

What is YouCongress?

YouCongress is a platform for improving democracy, starting with AI safety, governance, and the impact of AI on jobs. AI agents gather sourced statements, helping people explore different views, vote, and delegate to those they trust. Creators gain insights into their audiences. Our aim is to improve public debate, help decision-makers understand the evidence and the people affected by their choices, and help new trusted voices emerge, including people who have never considered running for office.

YouCongress is a non-profit, open-source project. We preserve the provenance of sourced quotes and claims and offer decision support rather than binding referendums.

Forecasters ask "What will happen?" We ask "What should we do?" and "What would we love to happen even when unlikely?" Inspired by Scott Alexander's idea of "Moloch" (misaligned incentives pushing everyone toward outcomes nobody wants), YouCongress makes shared preferences visible. It combines direct voting, optional delegation, and sourced expertise to help leaders understand public and expert values.

More about this on our LessWrong post.

Why start with AI?

AI raises connected questions about safety, governance, jobs, and who benefits from technological change. These questions bring together technical evidence, different values, and choices that affect many people. They give us a concrete place to test whether sourced statements and public participation can improve debate and inform decisions. Our broader mission is to improve democracy, and the approach can also be tested on other public questions.

How can YouCongress help decision-makers?

Decision-makers can compare sourced positions on a proposal, examine objections, and explore participants’ views through opinions, votes, and delegation. Our aim is to help them understand both the evidence and the people affected by their choices, whether they are preparing a briefing, consulting on a policy, or weighing a decision.

Participants are self-selected, so results are not a representative poll. Decision-makers still need to assess the evidence, seek missing perspectives, and take responsibility for their choices. Our theory of change explains how we want to test this contribution.

How can creators understand their audiences?

With Reconsider, creators can pair an article or video with up to three YouCongress statements. Readers or viewers report their positions before and after the content in one form and can choose featured people as delegates. The shared results show reported changes in views and delegate selections, helping creators explore where participants agree, disagree, or reconsider.

Reconsider is in beta. The responses are self-reported and come from people who choose to participate; they do not represent the whole audience or prove that the content caused a change in opinion.

How could new trusted voices emerge?

People can share their reasoning, engage with objections, and earn trust from others who choose them as delegates. We hope this helps thoughtful contributors become known beyond their existing circles, including people who have never considered running for office. Some may discover an interest in public service; others may contribute through research, explanation, or community leadership.

This is an aim we want to test. Gaining delegates can indicate trust, but does not by itself demonstrate good judgment or readiness for office.

How does YouCongress support epistemic investigations?

YouCongress is designed to make investigations reusable instead of trapped in one-off reports or chat transcripts. It separates ingestion, structure, and assessment work so humans and AI systems can inspect and extend the same public record.

• Ingestion: capture sourced quotes, authors, dates, URLs, topics and verification status.
• Structure: connect sources to claims, policies, vote inferences, halls and author pages.
• Assessment: use the structured record to compare positions, reveal disagreement, and identify missing perspectives. This is the layer we most want to strengthen next.

What can users do?

YouCongress is still in its infancy, but you already can:

• explore verifiable quotes from experts and public figures
• create a Reconsider page to explore your audience’s views around an article or video.
• vote and share your perspective (votes are private unless you publish a comment).
• delegate to trusted experts, public figures and other users. You'll vote as the majority of your delegates unless you vote directly. In the future, we plan to add topic-based delegation and other delegation mechanisms.

What are YouCongress delegates?

YouCongress users can choose a list of delegates, similar to following others on social media. Unless they vote directly, their vote follows the most common answer among their delegates. For example, if five delegates vote on an issue and three vote in favor while two vote against, the user's delegated vote is in favor. If the delegate votes are tied, no delegated vote is recorded. A direct vote always takes precedence over delegation.

Future enhancements will introduce additional delegation mechanisms, including topic-specific delegation. This will enable users to appoint delegates for votes concerning specific areas such as their local community, economic matters, AI-related issues, and more.

In country and year result views, users can filter results by direct and delegated votes. This keeps the platform useful for people who want to consider direct votes separately.

How do sourced quotes work?

Signed-in users can add real quotes from notable figures and experts, then link them to the claims and policy proposals they bear on.

Every sourced quote must include a source URL or, for books, PDFs, and paywalled sources, a sufficiently identifying source passage. This lets readers check the attribution and context.

These sourced quotes help inform voters and investigators by providing expert perspectives, documented positions, and reusable provenance on various topics.

How are quotes verified? How can I help verify?

Sourced quotes on YouCongress can be checked across three layers: whether the quote is authentic, whether it is relevant to the policy or claim where it appears, and whether the vote inferred from it is correct. Each check has its own status; on statement pages, one badge summarizes them together.

An individual verification can be:

• Endorsed: the author personally confirmed the quote, relation, or vote, for example by signing in or by contacting an admin.
• Verified: a human reviewer checked the source and marked the item as correct.
• AI Verified: the automated verifier checked the source and found support for the item.
• Disputed: a reviewer or automated check found a problem, such as a mismatched quote, statement relation, or vote answer.
• Unverifiable: the available source is not enough to confirm or reject the item.
• AI Unverifiable: the automated verifier could not confirm the item, usually because the source was inaccessible or inconclusive.
• Unverified: no current positive, disputed, or unverifiable verification is recorded yet, or a reviewer cleared the status.

On a statement page, the combined badge displays an AI Unverifiable check as Unverifiable.

A quote can still appear while some checks are pending. Downstream checks, such as relation and vote-answer verification, depend on the quote itself first being confirmed by a positive status like Endorsed, Verified, or AI Verified.

Want to help verify quotes? Email us at verify@youcongress.org and we will get you set up.

How can I change/delete content attributed to me?

If you find any quotes or content incorrectly attributed to you, or you want to change/delete content, please sign in with X so you can do it directly or contact us at support@youcongress.org and we'll address it promptly.

Who is behind YouCongress?

YouCongress was started by Hector Perez, with UX and design contributions from Gonzalo Cardenete.

Read about their backgrounds on our About page.

Who funds YouCongress?

YouCongress has been completely self-funded, except for the $5,000 Future of Life Foundation prize awarded through its Epistemic Case Study Competition. Read about the award.

How can I contribute?

You can contribute by adding sourced quotes to statements (policy proposals and claims) or suggesting important missing perspectives. To help review quotes, email us at verify@youcongress.org .

If you're a developer, you can contribute on our open source codebase on GitHub. You can also contact us at hello@youcongress.org