On September 1, 2011, David Plouffe, Senior Advisor to the President of the United States to Barack Obama, announced in an email that the White House was releasing "We the People", an online platform for the public to create petitions to the US Government.

The launch of the petitioning platform was announced by Katelyn Sabochik on September 22, 2011 in a White House blog post.

[4] On January 20, 2021, the day of the inauguration of Joe Biden, the platform started redirecting to the main whitehouse.gov domain, marking the discontinuance of the feature by the incoming administration.

[8][9][failed verification] In October 2009, the White House web servers adopted Drupal, a free and open-source content management system,[10][11] which runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

[12] In December 2017, the Trump administration launched a redesigned website developed using WordPress which it claimed would save taxpayers "almost $3 million per year".