Resistbot

Resistbot was established by Eric Ries and Jason Putorti in January 2017.[4] Jason Putorti attended the University of Pittsburgh where he graduated with a BS in computer science.[5] Before launching Resistbot, he served as the designer at AngelList and previously co-founded Causes and Votizen.[6] He expresses that one of his goals in creating Resistbot was to create a universal way to increase civic engagement and civic education.[7] Though the program was founded to oppose the actions of the Trump administration,[8] it functions as an unbiased channel, allowing users to compose their own messages. Unlike many other advocacy efforts, it provides no scripts to users.[9] Donations from users pay for postage for letters and voter registration forms, faxes and calls to officials, and texts between the users and the service.[1] When Resistbot began, letters were faxed[10] to officials' offices. However, as the program received more heavy usage, and officials started to unplug their fax machines, it switched to electronic delivery as a primary channel, with faxes, postal letters, and hand deliveries as secondary methods.[11] The first states that had access to Resistbot's feature of texting one's state legislature were Arizona, California, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington.[12] Between June 21 and 22, 2018 alone, Resistbot volunteers delivered 12,781 letters to the U.S. Senate, largely about family separation.[13] Those letters represented only a small sample of deliveries overall.[14] Within 4 months of launch, 730,000 people had used Resistbot,[15] and by six months 1,000,000.[16]

Users text the word "resist" to 50409, and follow a series of prompts.[17] Resistbot asks for a name and a zip code to confirm to the representatives that these are real users. If a user wants to write to one of their officials, Resistbot will ask for their address to find out who represents them, ask for the user to type out the letter they want to send, and deliver the message via electronic delivery, fax, or postal mail, depending on what method is available. The first message, by default, will be sent to the user's Senators, and after more engagement there is opportunity for the messages to be sent elsewhere.[18] Users may also use Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or Telegram to use the service.[1] Resistbot is free to use,[19] and does not require an app download. A full list of keywords is available on the Resistbot website.

Resistbot has been featured on many news and magazine sites including Recode, Teen Vogue, Fast Company, Engadget, GOOD Magazine, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, and Huffington Post. In an interview with Recode, Putorti acknowledged that though the product's main purpose was to voice those in opposition to the Trump Presidency, the system delivers all messages without regard to political views.[20] Resistbot's Twitter feed features many responses by members of Congress to users who have sent messages through the software.[21] It was called, "The Most Genius Thing Of 2017" by GOOD magazine.[22]

The more times a user engages with Resistbot, the more features they unlock. For example, the second time they use it they can unlock the option to contact a representative in their area. On the third and fourth use, users can begin unlocking town hall locations. The idea behind this was to both promote usage, and ensure users were not overwhelmed with their first few uses, if there were too many options. The more advanced users become, the more specific they can choose to be in terms of which representatives their messages get sent to.[7]

In April 2017 Resistbot added a feature called "Letters to the Editor". This feature allows users to choose to send their message both to their elected official, and directly to a local newspaper or media source in their area. This allows the message they wrote to get seen by their communities and can help them gain support for their cause, potentially leading to more people texting Resistbot about this cause.[15]

During the congressional recess in August 2017, Resistbot helped to facilitate what they called flash-mobs. When members of congress were refusing to attend town hall meetings, Resistbot encouraged users to organize or protest in order to help gain support for their causes.[15]

In November 2017, Resistbot was used as a channel by Medium to push Net Neutrality letters to Congress. The article published seven letter templates for readers to send to their representatives in favor of net neutrality.[23] Individuals couldn't send a message to the FCC or its commissioners, only the elected officials who attend to the address that the user enters into the prompts. In January 2018, The Peace Report published an article pushing its users to send letters to government officials through Resistbot in order to oppose the construction of two new military bases in Okinawa.[24] The article contained a letter template for readers to copy and paste to Congress representatives. In February 2018, WUSA TV fact checked and verified that texting "NRA" to Resistbot would tell users how their officials had benefited, or been hurt by, NRA contributions.[25] In September 2018, InStyle Magazine listed it as a way to "make your voice heard," regarding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.[26]

In 2020, Resistbot was cited as a way to help save the United States Postal Service by Mashable,[27] New York (magazine),[28] and Vogue (magazine).[29] The "widespread claims" were fact-checked by Snopes, which tested the service and wrote, "the process took around five minutes with the only significant delay coming when the user awaits a verification code sent to their email address. Snopes could confirm that the letter was sent to the representatives in question because the office of one of them, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pennsylvania, happened to respond later on with an acknowledgement that explicitly addressed the topic of the letter..."[30]

During the 2018 midterms, Analyst Institute ran an academic control-group study on Resistbot. The authors wrote that the voter turnout program, "was highly cost-effective and able to generate an impressive number of net voters, surpassing the performance of many other programs in midterm election cycles."[31] In another study, Dr. Christopher Mann, Ph. D. wrote in the Journal of Experimental Political Science that Resistbot, "increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points in a 2019 election".[32]

In March 2017, Micah L. Sifry wrote, "making it easier to digitally contact your Member of Congress paradoxically makes it more likely that they will discount the value of your opinion," in a criticism of the service.[33] Lee Drutman similarly wrote, "these services and technologies are cheapening the meaning of civic engagement by turning it into a commodity..."[34]

In September 2017, during the political fight over health care, Eric Ries told Business Insider, "if I didn't read the news, I would know when there's a new bill from the server melt down problems alone."[3]

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