One of the first steps the new Trump administration has taken is to shut down the White House comment line (UPDATE: Trump didn’t do it, see below). According to Variety, if you call that phone number now, you get a message instructing you to reach out to the White House via Facebook Messenger. This idea would be stupid even if the White House or President Trump had a Facebook Messenger account, which, at the time of this posting, they do not (though the Donald J. Trump page does feature – and I’m not joking – a very prominent link to “Shop Now”). 

This is probably more of a garden-variety first-couple-of-days flub than really a lie – someone shut off the phone line before they had a chance to get the Messenger account up and running. Still, it bears noting because as every activist in the world will tell you, calling your representatives is the most effective way of making your voice heard short of actually visiting their offices. Picking up the phone forces an actual human to spend time talking to you. Those actual humans have to take notes on what you say and keep some kind of record on it. And at some point, if enough people call about the same topic, those actual humans, being humans, hopefully get sick of hearing people rant about the same thing over and over, and so they pressure their boss to actually do something about the issue.

Facebook Messenger does not work quite the same way. First of all, one can just ignore Facebook messages. I do it myself all the time (haha just kidding, friends! (No but seriously)). Also, if you’re willing to pay for it, you can have a robot do your chatting for you. I assume this is what the White House intends to do. The problem with this is that robots do not care how many people complain to them about the same thing. They will sit there and listen mindlessly and provide the same scripted response to every problem. And then perhaps what you talked about will be categorized and go into a database, or perhaps it won’t, but the point is no one’s life will have been affected by your reaching out, and that means reaching out will become less useful.

To prove my point, here is a screenshot of a conversation I had with one of Disney’s Messenger chatbots, Miss Piggy:

I messaged her three times between 8:29 a.m. and 8:32 a.m. and she didn’t even answer me. To be fair, maybe she doesn’t work early mornings. Here’s a transcript of a conversation I had with HealthTap, a bot that dispenses health advice 24/7:

Ok, so I have to admit that I often lay awake at night wondering “Why i’m so hide?” But aside from that astonishing coincidence, these results are not super useful. And that’s not HealthTap’s fault – actually, when it’s asked a more typical question, it becomes one of the more helpful chatbots I’ve used. But when you talk to a chatbot, it’s not listening to you, and it’s not responding to you – it’s responding to an algorithm. One of the pluses to using a chatbot is around-the-clock availability (except, apparently, in the case of Miss Piggy). One of the minuses is that a human being may never find out what you had to say. And when you’re trying to be an activist, that’s a huge minus. The Trump administration is cutting itself off from the American public only days after the president promised in his inaugural address that he intended to return power to the people.

I will update this post if/when Miss Piggy responds.

UPDATE, 1/24 2:57 p.m: So it appears that the comment line was actually shut down in the week before the inauguration as the Obama administration was winding down. I’m leaving the post up because the White House still has no comment line and using Messenger as a way to communicate with elected officials is still dumb. Someone currently working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should either change the voicemail or get someone on the phones. Still no answer from Miss Piggy, btw.