eli5: How do online petitions work? Are they effective?
In: Technology
A bunch of people “sign” a petition asking for X thing to happen, by basically upvoting it. Then the person they are attempting to get a response from either responds to it, or they don’t.
In general they’re not effective. Change.org for example has had very successful petitions that either get completely ignored, or gets a response of basically “no, we won’t be doing that”.
The problem is that it takes 2 seconds to sign an online petition, and things that require low effort often don’t correlate to a strong conviction/willingness to back it up. Politicians are only scared into action by things that might cost them votes, and companies are only scared of things that could cost them money.
Online petitions have a cause that they want to address, and aim to have a particular number of signatures (online its basically name and email) to say that X many people deeply care about the stance the petition represents. Because there is no legal binding that comes with it, they’re often ineffective in terms of affecting change.
However, the word “effective” depends on what you mean. What a petition does ultimately provide you with is a list of people’s email that took time out of their day to sign what appears to be a meaningless gesture. That means you have X amount of people who cared enough to sign, and perhaps out of that number there may be Y amount of people willing to donate to a cause. You essentially have a list of people that may ***potentially*** want to work alongside you towards solving a problem, and seeing that type of support may be one of the few things people who are oppressed can lean on.
Here in the UK, our Parliament has an online petition system that guarantees a topic will be debated if it reached a certain threshold. I believe it’s 1,000 signatures. The system uses public data to match signatures to residents, so they can be reasonably sure of the numbers.
Other than that sort of system, online petitions tend to be meaningless except as a data-harvesting tool, as the other replies have described.
In addition to the other comments, for the most part there’s nothing policing the legitimacy of the “signatures” on these petitions. There’s nothing stopping me from signing 1000 fake names on them, other than *maybe* requiring unique email addresses (not hard). These also usually nothing stopping me from signing a petition on some minor local issue all the way across the world. Not all online petitions are created equally… government of Canada, for example, has a dedicated online petition area on its website and they are required to act if a certain threshold is passed. But they require more information than just a name & email address.
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