In a blog post by the White House, it was announced that citizens are now allowed to send their messages to President Barack Obama with the help of a chatbot on Facebook Messenger.
Every night, as part of a daily routine since he took office back in 2009, President Obama reads 10 letters that citizens sent to him. Reading these letters have allowed him to largely keep in touch with what is happening around the United States from the perspective of the country's people.
"It ends up being a powerful motivator for me," Obama has said about the practice, which has been done before by the presidents of the United States going back to Thomas Jefferson, and as early as the 1880s, the White House began receiving phone calls.
Messages that will be sent to the official White House page on Facebook through Messenger will be among the 10 messages that will be considered to be sent to President Obama for his nightly readings.
To be able to send a message to President Obama, users will first have to access the official Facebook page of the White House. From there, users can then click on the Message option that will bring up a chatbox. After clicking on the Let's Go option, users can then type out their message. Afterward, they will be requested to provide contact information, and then they can finally send the message out.
A chatbot will be guiding users throughout the whole process, simulating a conversation that leads to users sending messages to the Office of Presidential Correspondence, which is the department that collects and processes all the messages that citizens send to President Obama.
The chatbot does not really do a whole lot in the process, but according to the Washington Post's Andrea Peterson, using the chatbot turned out to be actually more complicated than simply sending an email to the White House, which is a method to reach the President that has been available to citizens since 1994.
Nevertheless, the addition of a Facebook Messenger option to send a message to President Obama shows how times changed, as people are now increasingly using digital communication tools over other forms. Taking advantage of Facebook's chatbot features for Messenger is an easy decision for the White House in that regard.
What is surprising, however, is that the White House embraced the new Facebook feature, without any unnecessary gimmicks, just months after the company announced that chatbots were being released to Messenger. This shows the commitment of President Obama in keeping in touch with citizens through all means possible, and his involvement in technological advances is one of the legacies that he will leave once he steps down from office in January 2017.
