eli5: How do online petitions work? Are they effective?
In: Technology
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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