Last year, reporter Bram Sable Smith started hanging out in these private Facebook groups.

These groups started forming because I'm in Wisconsin and Wisconsin just like every

state in the country saw a record number of unemployment claims.

Record numbers of people were losing their jobs.

You know, you would often hear people saying like, I never thought that I would lose my job,

but suddenly here we are.

At first, there were only a few hundred people in these digital support groups.

Then, a few thousand.

And once they got over the shock of being laid off, the people here started sorting through

their anger.

They were often dealing with unemployment systems that were overloaded.

They would trade tips and tricks for how to get help.

People could vent, they could share tips about ways to reach the department that administers

unemployment to maybe help their case move along a little quicker.

One of the top tricks Bram saw folks recommending was call a politician.

Get an elected official to adopt your cause.

Advocate for you.

I talked to one representative here in Madison who won election last year.

And she inherited from her predecessor a list of people whose claims were still in progress

that she could then start to follow up on so that they wouldn't drop the ball.

No one thought this was a good system, but it was a system.

And then, very suddenly, a year into the pandemic, something changed.

...