A deep dive into whether signing online petitions can *actually* cause change 👇
‘I didn’t really know what to expect or realise how quick things could take off,’ adds Matt, age 30. ‘My initial aim was for 1,000 signatures.’one evening in March 2021, the nurse headed for bed, not knowing how his campaign would be received.
The founder of Change.org, Preethi Herman, attributes such a massive jump in participation over the last two years to the world entering ‘a new era of civic engagement and digital activism’. In a statement earlier this year, she said, ‘there are a number of non-traditional players who are leading the way to create a new wave of positive, people-driven change.
Matt remembers knowing that he had to ‘do something’ with his petition. ‘The government needed to see the outcry of what people thought,’ he explains. ‘I wanted to hold them to account,’ he explains. ‘They were taking the mick. We were working on the front line in full PPE and they were all sitting in their gardens laughing at our expense.
‘Timing is also really important, both in the sense of launching a petition on an issue when it’s high up in the news and on people’s radar, but also when there is still an opportunity to change something.’ After months of listening to girls share their experiences of inappropriate, sexualised behaviour from men and boys both in and out of school, Ebony, who works in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, decided she had to figure out a way to tackle the problem.‘They would say to me that with the pandemic, they had been really depressed, without anyone to talk to,’ recalls Ebony. ‘They started telling me how they weren’t happy in school.
In April 2021, Ebony, a trained mentor, sent out 13 emails to secondary schools in the borough, volunteering herself and other peers for free mentoring within the four walls of the school building. ‘Only two out of 12 schools got back to me,’ she says, adding that she felt confounded by such little response over something so important.
Even though Ebony told people about her campaign, with links in the bio of all her socials, and mentioned it in media interviews, it simply wasn’t getting signatures. In his line of work, he spends a lot of time looking into technology risk, including manipulation-based campaigns, and says that not all petitions are created equally.
‘Petitions are often one element of a campaign,’ says Bentall. ‘Whether or not it brings about real change relies on so many other factors. It is often the catalyst for a wider campaign that can then go on to have a real impact.’As a young child growing up in Oregon, Konrad Juengling often hid in the shadows in a bid to avoid drawing attention to himself.
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