In 2023 alone, there were 656 mass shootings and 43,188 victims in the U.S., making it the second-worst year for shootings ever, but not a single federal gun law was passed.
Change the Ref’s mission is to generate attention and awareness for gun law reform so Congress will take action. They’ve successfully created projects that generate millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments online.
However, attention given to and awareness of gun law reform on social media was not enough. Echo chambers prevented lawmakers from truly hearing their constituents online. Likes, shares, and retweets don’t hold up against cold, hard gun lobby money. Change the Ref needed to arm people with something sharper and stronger: real civic participation and engagement. Civic actions directed toward representatives would be more valuable (and unignorable) than opinions screamed online.
Our objective was simple: Generate a simple but powerful form of civic engagement to demand gun law reform in the U.S.
In the face of American gun violence, the only people who can make meaningful, lasting change are the 535 people who won’t: U.S. Congress. To change the laws, we needed to change the minds of the lawmakers. To do that, we needed to take action, targeting them directly.
One of the most effective forms of civic engagement is a simple phone call, but only 10% of the U.S. population reported contacting public officials using this method. If only more Americans realized how powerful a simple phone call could be. Kris Miler, political researcher and author of “Constituency Representation in Congress,” explains that while both calls and emails have an impact, “the impact of calls is much stronger.” Phone calls are harder to ignore: “If your phone’s ringing off the hook all day long, that’s pretty memorable.” Calls are tracked, recorded, and logged into a database with the caller’s zip code and the issue at hand.
We needed to find a way to make a phone call to representatives as easy as possible for the public and as provocative as possible for the lawmakers on the other end of the line.
So we did the unthinkable and used AI to bring back the voices of victims killed in mass shootings to generate calls to representatives and demand gun reform.
We built a digital website, the Shotline, to house the experience. Anyone can visit the site to get a sense of who these victims were, hear their AI calls, and, most importantly, easily send those calls to Congress. With just a few clicks and their zip code, users can flood the phone lines of their specific representatives with calls from the gun violence victims.
Created by our in-house team of lawyers and creative technologists, this “programmatic calling system” was the centerpiece of the Shotline. It automated the communications process to make taking action a seamless experience for the user. It’s the world’s first by-the-books system designed to place AI voice calls to the U.S. federal government.
It took over six months of working with the families of gun violence victims to collect home videos, written accounts, and social media posts by their loved ones. With these resources, we used AI to re-create the voices of the gun violence victims themselves, accurately capturing their personalities and mannerisms. We used these same resources to create phone call scripts that reflected the passions, hobbies, and dreams these individuals had when they were alive.
The Shotline is still active, adding more victims’ voices since its launch and more calls every day. The voices will continue calling—again and again—mounting pressure on Congress until gun reform legislation is passed.
The Shotline was described by NPR as “a new frontier in politics” and by the WSJ as “a new era for artificial intelligence” due to its radically innovative approach to gun reform advocacy.
Within the first month, the campaign reached +51K social mentions, 1,235 news articles across the country, and +5.4B impressions, all with $0 spent on media. The campaign was an Apple News Editors’ Pick, becoming a push notification for every Apple News user in the country. On social media, there was a 46% increase in gun reform conversation in the two weeks after the campaign launched.
Most importantly, we moved people from simply vocally advocating for gun reform to direct action. We drove +150K unique users to the Shotline website in the first 10 days, and 83% of those users sent the victims’ phone calls. Over 178K calls have been placed to members of Congress so far, reaching every representative and senator in the U.S. multiple times over. Whether reactions to our calls were positive or negative, we knew we were being heard. We received reactions from Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Reps. Maxwell Frost and Tim Burchett. Gun reform opponents such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have received over 7,000 calls each.
