Under Trump 2017, 'We the People' White House petition website is broken (see data)

The U.S. White House website contains a petitions section that allows anyone to create a petition and gather signatures with the goal of obtaining a response from the White House. Suddenly, since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these petitions aren't working. Bug or feature?

2025 note: The site was https://petitions.whitehouse.gov. As it no longer exists, I've removed some of the clickable links.

The rules under the Obama administration, which created the petition functionality: Once a petition is created, its creator must reach two milestones within 30 days. First, the creator is responsible for circulating it to gather the first 150 signatures, as the creator is the only one who initially has the URL of the petition. Second, after the petition has 150 signatures, it will be published to the White House petitions webpage so that anyone can find it, and, if it reaches 100,000 signatures, the White House will respond to it. All petitions expire after 30 days, meaning they will no longer be available on the White House petitions webpage and will no longer be signable even if you know the direct URL.

The site promises: “Petitions will only be removed under the Moderation Policy — no petition will be removed because of the viewpoint it expresses.” This assurance was still available as of Jan. 27, 2017, one week after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President. Nonetheless, a number of people noticed that certain petitions did not seem to be working.

For example, a petition called "Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities" was created on Jan. 21, 2017. Two days later, the Independent reported that this petition

"received hundreds of tweets from proud signees but the official count (at the time of writing) reads: '27 signed'." Jillian Steinhauer wrote for Hyperallergic on Jan. 25 that it "shows only 44 signatures, despite hundreds of people having tweeted that they signed it. Many have noticed the discrepancy, with one tweeter claiming that the petition had nearly 100,000 signatures yesterday [Jan. 24]; another says the number was originally in the tens of thousands. The other petition shows 734 signatures, a small climb from the 724 listed earlier today, but does not seem to be accurately counting those who’ve signed based on the sharing rate suggested by social media. It also appears to have been set up only after a previous petition vanished."

Update: On Jan. 28, the count was at 176 and it was visible on the White House petitions webpage. An attempt to sign it was successful, incrementing the count to 177.

Not all petitions were working as of Jan. 28, however. For example, a petition titled "End the media blackout on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)" created on Jan. 25 still displayed only 1 signer as of Jan. 28, despite repeated attempts by several people to sign it. Accordingly, it showed the counter: "Needs 99,999 signatures by February 24, 2017 to get a response from the White House." Similarly, "To explain to the American people why President Donald J. Trump is such a needy little bitch," created Jan. 23, only had 1 signature five days after its creation, despite having a link distributed in a BuzzFeed article. That, to be fair, runs afoul of the site's 'Terms of Participation' banning "Defamatory or fraudulent statements" and "Terms commonly understood to constitute profanity or abusive or degrading slurs or epithets," but that does not fully explain why the petition still exists and is simply apparently not working.

Blake Montgomery wrote for BuzzFeed: "President Obama’s administration created We The People in 2011...whether the Trump administration will respond to petitions is unconfirmed. On the day of his inauguration, Trump’s administration archived all existing petitions on the platform." In other words, the Trump administration is not accepting new signatures on any petition created during the final days of the Obama administration, and one may speculate that they may not intend to respond to any of those petitions that may have reached the 100,000-signature goal. In that article, a White House spokesperson was quoted as attributing the malfunction to a technical bug: “It’s a question of high volume at the end of the day, but the signatures are being captured. Because of high volume they’re having to change how they’re being captured.”

Under this administration, technical difficulties — or, depending on your interpretation, diminished accountability to public comment — are not limited to the petition website. "Since at least the end of the Obama administration," Tyler Pager wrote for the Boston Globe on Jan. 26, "the White House’s phone line for comments has not been taking calls. It is unclear exactly when the line was closed, and it is equally unclear when it will be back." A recorded message directs callers "to send us a comment online...or send us a message through Facebook messenger.'"

As quoted in an LA Times article about the closing of the telephone comment line on Mon. Jan. 23, the first business day after the inauguration, press assistant Giovanna Coia said, “We’re still learning how to work our computers."

Update: People were calling the Capitol about their political concerns even though they couldn't call the White House. U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted at the end of the day on Feb. 2: "The last three days have been the BUSIEST IN CAPITOL SWITCHBOARD HISTORY. By almost double."

The following table shows all available petitions on the White House website as of Friday night, Jan. 27 and continuing through Sat. morning, Jan. 28. During this brief time period (about 15 hours, overnight), only one petition newly reached the 150-signature threshhold to be published to the site. This was the "Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities" petition referenced above, suggesting that it may be necessary for the White House website to receive negative press from an internationally recognized newspaper like The Independent before any specific petition will be published. Also during this time, no petitions newly crossed the 100,000 signature threshhold. Only two had over 100,000 signatures, and both of them had been created on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, suggesting that the new administration had not yet begun to change the way the petition site worked.

The domain WHPetitions.info, purchased in 2013, contains simple content that appears to confirm the above. It says: "Helping the White House keep its promise" and as of Jan. 28, 2017 it indicates that "0 White House petitions have met their signature thresholds". It appears that some values are supposed to auto-calculate, as suggested by what appears to be bogus output as a result of calculating with 0. "The White House has responded to 0 of them (-9223372036854775808%) with an average response time of -106752 days". The site credits Eli Dourado, whose active Twitter account identifies him as an "economist working on accelerating the pace of technological change."

[By the way, an update: The Biden administration did not resurrect this website.]

Petitions on the W.H. website in late Jan. 2017
Column 1 has the petition name, Column 2 has the number of signatures as of a certain date, and Column 3 has the incremented number of signatures as of the next day

Petition title	Signatures as of Fri 1/27, 8 pm ET	Signatures as of Sat 1/28, 11 am ET
Immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance.	391,917	404,078
Divest or put in a blind trust all of the President's business and financial assets.	121,885	126,395
Donald Trump: Resign as President of the United States in Violation of the Emoluments Clause. Release Your Tax Returns	23,163	24,417
Let American Farmers Grow Hemp Once Again to Create Jobs and Rebuild the Rural Economy	20,690	21,389
Demand Trump administration add LGBT rights, climate change, and civil rights back to list of issues on wh.gov site	4,959	6,422
Repeal the 1986 Hughes amendment	3,466	3,588
Repeal the NFA	2,876	3,143
Investigate Hillary Clinton for crimes committed against the People and Government of the United States.	1,688	1,811
Do not defund the NEA or NEH	1,027	1,128
Demand justice for international students affected by ACICS' loss of accreditation power	916	945
Arrest and detainment of singer Madonna.	605	625
Charge Madonna with Terrorist Threats against the president of the United States of America.	568	599
Issue an International Arrest Warrant for George Soros	507	545
Boost the American Economy through Climate Action	440	452
Immediately abolish the Net Worth Sweep of Fannie Mae(FNMA) and Freddie Mac(FMCC).	327	335
Restore Education as a Constitutional Right & Protect Medical Freedom	296	307
Change the law putting a financial strain on many disabled veterans	294	298
Improved Medicare for All	285	308
Pledge to continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities	252	339
Restore and maintain accurate, science-based information on climate change to the White House website.	285	306
We the decent Venezuelan people ask President Donald Trump to help recoup Venezuela's sovereignty, liberty and democracy	281	286
Call on the The Republic of Cameroon government to stop the killing and marginalization of Anglophone Cameroonians.	217	223
Reinstate Lt. Col. Terry Lakin into the U.S. Army with full rank, pay, benefits and pension immediately.	171	200
Total signatures across these 23 petitions (Total change overnight: +21,024 signatures, or an average of 914 signatures per petition)	577,115	598,139

 

One newly published petition on the W.H. website in late Jan. 2017
Column one has the petition name, column two would represent the number of signatures as of Friday night and this column is deliberately empty because the number is not known because the petition was not yet published, and column three has the number of signatures as of the next day

Petition title	Signatures as of Fri 1/27, 8 pm ET	Signatures as of Sat 1/28, 11 am ET
Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities	Unknown	176

2018 and 2019 updates

No petitions were given responses in 2017, although some had crossed the threshold number for earning a response. Around New Year's 2018, the following message appeared on the homepage:

To improve this site's performance, the platform is currently down for maintenance and will return in late January.

All existing petitions and associated signatures have been preserved and will be available when the site is relaunched. Following the site's relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses.

When visited Feb. 27, the petition site was back online. Seven petitions had received responses from the White House.

By May 4, no additional petitions had received responses. There were 44 active petitions, 13 of which had long since reached their signature threshhold and were due for White House responses, and the remainder of which were still in their 30-day period to reach the threshhold.

By February 22, 2019, no additional petitions had received responses. There were 71 active petitions, 27 of which had reached their signature threshold and were due for White House responses.

How sincerity differs from honesty

Sam Roberts wrote The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case after interviewing David Greenglass. Greenglass stole nuclear intelligence from Los Alamos, N.M. After being told that his wife had told the FBI that his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, had been involved, Greenglass readily testified against Ethel and her husband Julius. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Greenglass said in the book that “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember,” that he had named his sister to protect his wife, and that he did not regret it. “My wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother or my father, O.K.? And she was the mother of my children.”

(Greenglass died in 2014.) Greenglass lied, but he was sincere — decades after the fact — about how he felt about his lie.


With intimates, at least, if the relationship is to be preserved, sincerity certainly has an important place. Sam Harris took a hardline stance against lying in his brief book by that name:

Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding – these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

And while we imagine that we tell certain lies out of compassion for others, it is rarely difficult to spot the damage we do in the process. By lying, we deny our friends access to reality – and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information. Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

In the passage above, he claims that honesty is an essential part of sincerity.

(Update: Oh, but by the way:)

R. Jay Magill, Jr. argued that sincerity is not the same as honesty or frankness, but rather is about accurately reporting "one's innermost thoughts or emotions, no matter how relevant, factually wrong, or counterproductive." It is therefore a kind of intimacy best reserved for the private sphere.


He wrote for the Boston Globe:

"In the realm of politics, in fact, the demand for sincerity is relatively new, a legacy of Reformation-era religion that only in recent decades has come to seem as important, or even more important than, qualities like leadership, managerial skill, or knowledge. * * * Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle all justified the 'noble lie,' which placed lofty public goals ahead of personal morality."

Consider this Oct. 31, 2018 example from the U.S. President who said he was "really impressed" with a fellow politician for showing a "sincere level of compassion, grief and sorrow," which apparently is a qualification for the sincere man's reelection. (The original tweet is here; the UnfollowTrump bot copies his tweets and simply allows readers to avoid the president's actual Twitter account.)

Yesterday in Pittsburgh I was really impressed with Congressman Keith Rothfus (far more so than any other local political figure). His sincere level of compassion, grief and sorrow for the events that took place was, in its own way, very inspiring. Vote for Keith!

— Unfollow Trump (@UnfollowTrump) October 31, 2018

We certainly wear emotional masks of different kinds at different times. Whether it is good or bad, it is probably not completely avoidable.

One of those masks is sentimentality, according to James Baldwin: "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty."

In Magill's book Sincerity (2012), he wrote: "Sincerity “means confronting one’s innermost thoughts or emotions and relaying them to others straightforwardly, no matter how relevant to the topic, injurious to one’s own reputation, or embarrassing – or however correct or incorrect. Sincerity, in other words, is a subjective state that need not have anything to do with reality." (p. 13) He also raised the question of an alternate use of the term: “does sincerity mean revealing one’s intentions openly and avoiding deceit (as in, “I mean this sincerely”), or does it mean pursuing one’s goals in accordance with one’s true beliefs (as in, “I sincerely believe that X is the right thing to do and will stop at nothing to do it”)?” (p. 19) In one analysis, sincerity reveals depth that enables people to grow in conversation with each other. Christopher Phillips wrote:

"[Hazrat Inayat] Khan distinguishes between types of moral mirrors: that of ‘the insincere person,’ whose reflections reveal only surface — of himself and those who would seek to know more of themselves through him — versus the mirror of ‘the sincere person,’ whose reflections permeate surface and depth at once. When two sincere people are ‘focused on one another...with love,’ each helps the other gain greater literal and figurative vision of who they are and still might be."

Sherwin T. Wine offered a differing interpretation from a pragmatic perspective. Whatever is inside people's hearts (their self-understanding, their intentions, and so forth), it does not always correspond to their behavior, and often their actual behavior is what really matters (or should matter) to themselves and others. It is one thing to be sincere about our precious, rarefied, idealized understandings of ourselves, and another to be honest about what we do.

Ambitious politicians do not turn me off so long as they help their constituents. Self-absorbed parents do not bother me as long as they nurture children. Cynical teachers do not arouse my disdain as long as they elevate the skills of their students. Motivation is so complex that it is difficult to know which intention is the ‘real’ one. To be ‘pure of heart’ and a behavioral disaster is meaningless to me. When the cult of incompetence is wedded to the cult of good intentions only disaster ensues.

The greatest source of illusion is the inability to distinguish between intentions and behavior. So often we think that what we are is what we say we want to be — or that other people are what they say they want to be. Realism is replaced by a naive sincerity.

Sincerity often victimizes us. People ask us what we feel and believe — and we tell them what we sincerely feel and believe — even though what we sincerely think we feel and believe has nothing to do with our own behavior. We — and others — settle for sincerity when what we should be demanding is truth.

Appropriate expectations do not rely on some necessary correlation between saintly motivation and saintly behavior. They prefer to notice competence and strength of will. Maybe, what people really want is what they end up doing.

---

Douglas Adams said:

“I believe or don’t believe my four-year-old daughter when she tells me that she didn’t make that mess on the floor. I believe in justice and fair play (though I don’t know exactly how we achieve them, other than by continually trying against all possible odds of success). I also believe that England should enter the European Monetary Union. I am not remotely enough of an economist to argue the issue vigorously with someone who is, but what little I do know, reinforced with a hefty dollop of gut feeling, strongly suggests to me that it’s the right course. I could very easily turn out to be wrong, and I know that. These seem to me to be legitimate uses for the word believe.”

---

For human beings, belief “is *frequently not a binary state of mind*,” Dr. Sunny Moraine PhD said on Twitter on May 21, 2021. “Some people believe something all the time. Some people disbelieve something all the time. But I think for many if not the majority of people there is a conflicted gray area we occupy. Example: the ongoing debate about whether Trump/Republicans really ‘believe’ the lies they peddle.” Do they believe? Yes? No? Neither answer has “full explanatory power.” The beliefs may be sincere, but sincerity may not be “uniform or simple.” You can believe and disbelieve something simultaneously. So, the question “‘does this person believe this thing or not’ is almost always the wrong question.” And the questions you ask determine how you'll frame your inquiry. Your questions are "engaging" with "reality," and they might do so well or poorly.

---

Sources

"David Greenglass, Spy Who Helped Seal the Rosenbergs’ Doom, Dies at 92." Robert D. McFadden. The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2014.

"The case against sincerity." R. Jay Magill, Jr. The Boston Sunday Globe, April 1, 2012, p. K1.

James Baldwin, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. Quoted in The Week, May 23, 2014. p. 15.

R. Jay Magill, Jr. Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull). New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012.

Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 64.

Sherwin T. Wine. Staying Sane in a Crazy World: A Guide to Rational Living. Birmingham, Mich.: The Center for New Thinking, 1995. pp. 148.

The interview was reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. (A posthumous collection of Douglas Adams’ writings with a 2003 introduction by Terry Jones.) New York: Ballantine, 2005. pp. 96–97.

The constraint of the truth: Jonah Lehrer's over-imaginative book on creativity

When Jonah Lehrer's third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, imploded and took its author down with it, it had already sold hundreds of thousands of copies during the first half of 2012. The book has some merits despite Lehrer's admitted partial fabrication of its content, but overall it remains under the pall of scandal.

Originally published to Helium Network on Aug. 20, 2012.

Lying

The difficulty was that Michael C. Moynihan, another journalist with a keen interest in Bob Dylan, had attempted to track down the source of Lehrer's material about the singer-songwriter. Eventually, despite Lehrer's claims to have found the quotes in unreleased footage, Moynihan had proved that the alleged Bob Dylan interview didn't exist."I'm deeply sorry for lying," Lehrer told Moynihan. The story was revealed in Moynihan's article in "Tablet Magazine" on July 30, 2012.

The Bob Dylan quotes aren't the only ones that are suspect. Lehrer had also interviewed Milton Glaser, designer of the popular "I 'heart' NY" logo. When Glaser read "Imagine," he had a funny feeling that something wasn't right. Glaser told Ryan Kohls that "half of it I know I didn’t say. Substantially nothing in there was false...[but] the vernacular wasn’t right."

Sam Harris, author of a recent essay on "Lying," wrote that he is "slow to judge" fellow writers for errors for which they may be "guilty of nothing more than poor research practices." For Harris, the plagiarism was less important than the lie. Harris took the moment to caution that many "smart, well-intentioned, and otherwise ethical people...do not seem to realize how quickly and needlessly lying can destroy their relationships and reputations."

Whether the writer was well-intentioned or not, when a book on creativity titled "Imagine" turns out to be, at least in part, a work of fiction, it tempts readers to lampoon it in obvious ways. Some of Lehrer's lines provide direct fodder, such as this concluding bit from his "Coda":

"There is no more important meta-idea than knowing where every idea comes from. If we want to increase our creative powers, then we have to put this research to work in our own lives. We can imagine more than we know."

Well, now the public has learned where certain ideas came from, and it indeed had significant results for Lehrer. As Lehrer said of Crockett Johnson's famous children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon," in which a boy steps into a magic world where the laws of gravity still apply, "the book is a delicate blend of the familiar and the fictional. Harold has a surreal tool, but it operates amid the usual constraints."

Resignation

Roxane Gay suggested in "Salon" that Lehrer's rocketship to fame and the cavalier way in which he self-destructed indicate his privilege as a white man in the magazine profession. "Only entitlement can explain why someone would choose to lie in plain sight," she wrote.

In July 2012, Lehrer resigned from his position as a staff writer at the "New Yorker." A month earlier, the "New Yorker" had discovered that he had blogged content for them that he had previously published in the "Wall Street Journal," and the second scandal about the book was too much. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher of the troubled book, requested that retailers return unsold copies. Lehrer has not tweeted since the scandal, except to post an apology speech he delivered in February 2013 upon invitation from the Knight Foundation. As of Jan. 2014, Lehrer's own website still lists the book as available for sale; his bio, however, no longer appears on the site, having been deleted some months after the scandal.

Evaluating the book

When it is discovered that part of a work presented as non-fiction has been embellished, it disincentivizes others from thoroughly reviewing and analyzing the work. Who can know how much of the work is invented? When Lehrer reports that the Nike athletic slogan "Just do it" was derived from the last words of a murderer about to be executed, can he be believed (without resorting to the prior reporting of the "New York Times")? When it comes to weightier topics such as neuroscience, Lehrer describes the brain with the accessible style that is his trademark, but, unfortunately, no one who wants their own work to be taken seriously would be well-advised to cite "Imagine" as a source about how the brain works. So, researchers may as well spend their time seeking other sources.

Despite these setbacks, the casual reader can at least examine the general idea of the book. One of the book's strengths is its examination of some of the contradictory facets of creativity. For example, on the one hand Lehrer says that people are at their most creative when they are relaxed: half-asleep, showering, watching comedy, having down-time at work. On the other hand people who struggle against depression and other physical and emotional adversities tend to be more creative. Relaxation and effort thus both play a role.

For another example, creative genius often requires the investment of a great deal of perspiration, yet insight cannot be forced by deliberately going epiphany-chasing. People who get high scores on "creativity tests" are often daydreamers who have the special capacity to realize when their daydreams are generating insights and to seize the moment to follow up with a labor-intensive effort. They do not crank out the insights on command.

"Outsider thinking" is another hallmark of creativity. This means approaching a subject from a fresh point of view. Young people often exhibit this kind of thinking, simply because they have not yet had time to habituate themselves to particular opinions or methods. Older people can experiment with being "outsiders" when they attempt to solve problems that blend their usual competencies and skill sets with areas less familiar to them, or when they work with new groups of people.

Lehrer finds that a combination of solitary work, teamwork with longstanding colleagues and collaboration with new colleagues is the best recipe for creative success. The members of the working group should be ready to accept criticism from each other, because this is the way in which they will get honest feedback about what seems clever and inspired and what does not. Indeed, it sounds like a useful safety measure.

Image of Salle des Fetes, Paris, France from the Goodyear Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum Archives, and posted to Wikimedia Commons. © Photo taken at the Paris Exposition of 1900. No known copyright restrictions.