We don't want to hear of your petitions
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It appears that the "We the People" petition system has been taken off the White House website. Here is an archive of what it looked like before Biden took office.
The system has been around for many years. At any given time, hundreds of petitions were active. If you get 100,000 signatures, the White House is supposed to give an answer. You may remember that there was an active “Free Assange” petition that the Obama Administration was obligated to answer (and gave a bad answer).
When Trump took office, he briefly discontinued it but put it back up after a media uproar.
Now it appears the Biden White House has removed it. The website used to be here:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov
This URL, as well as URLs for all currently-active petitions, just forward to the White House front page. I explored the website and could not find any mention of it. The link used to appear in both the “Contact” and “Get Involved” links, but it is gone from both.
I have seen nothing about this in the media. When I Google “White House Petition System Down” and other similar searches, I only get 4-year-old articles about the time that Trump temporarily disabled it.
Wikipedia says that the system was taken down the day Biden took office: On January 20 2021, the day the Inauguration of Joe Biden took place, the website’s address started redirecting to the White House’s website home address.
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Bad move.
Given where we are with our adoption of technology, organizing and signifying supports for petitions online are here to stay. There should be a publicly funded, publicly maintained avenue for the citizenry to organize, debate, and support petitions. This function should not be entirely consigned to private social media platforms.
Now where can I start a petition to bring this "We the People" petition system back?
