14 DAY TRIAL // The White House has announced that President Obama will use a Facebook Messenger bot to receive messages from citizens. The measure was taken in order to improve the relationship between the US President and people living in the country.
It is known that President Obama reads 10 letters from citizens every night - and he's been doing so ever since he took office in 2009 - and his staff sorts through 64,000 paper letters every week and 100,000 emails, 1,000 faxes, and 35,000 calls per day. The staff also responds individually to each citizen who reaches out to the White House.
Communicating with citizens and staying in touch with the issues that they might be facing has always been a priority for US presidents. But with the advancement of technology, people no longer need to resort solely to mail in order to get their message through.
They can place a call to the White House, use the WhiteHouse.gov page to submit online messages, contact President Obama on his Twitter account or, the latest method, send a text through Messenger. Even the First Lady can be contacted through her Snapchat account.
The new Messenger bot doesn't limit the size of the message that can be sent, but the bot does request senders to provide their phone number, address and email address, in case the White House would like to contact them. However, the bot allows users to only send text, and not GIFs or emoji.
The new feature would mean increased popularity for Facebook's Messenger platform, but it's not like the service lacked it, since it has hit 1 billion monthly users worldwide just recently.