Why online petitions are often and still a bad idea.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
Yes, I expect to get some flak on this one because not everybody agrees.
Let me explain my position.
First, the question.
A mailing list I'm on encouraged all its readers to go to a website and sign
an internet petition supporting some legislation we care about.
I mentioned that to a friend of mine,
and his opinion was that I've been duped and that it was a scam.
Is he right? Are internet petitions a scam?
Some are, some aren't, but they all share one common characteristic.
In my opinion, most of them are completely
ineffectual and that can harm the very cause you're trying to support.
Here's what I mean.
Petitions can go wrong a number
of different ways, depending on the legitimacy of the service
or the host or whatever it is that is providing the petition.
It could just result in spam.
They could just be using it as a honey pot, of a sense, to gather email addresses
and as it turns out, actually associate those email addresses
with a particular cause that they know will get you to take action.
Whether or not they actually do anything with the petition is immaterial and often
they don't because what they're really doing is collecting information about you
so that they can then spam you in the future.
I would also throw into that bucket what I would call trickery.
I have seen petitions that, once again, force you to sign in,
force you to sign up, force you to do things in order to make
your opinion known, after which they then start pushing sales at you.
They try to get you to sign up for things,
to buy things, to basically pitch things that are not related to the topic at hand.
Now, I've got a couple of different variations on ineffectiveness.
When you sign an online petition,
you are making an assumption that the individual or the organization
to whom the results will be presented will actually do something with those results.
They may or they may not, and there's no way to know.
There's nothing that requires them to.
There's nothing that says they will or they won't, unless they're being super
transparent and sometime later you find out that they're telling you that, yes,
we were going to do X, but because of this petition, we're now doing Y.
That's fantastic, but I've never seen it happen.
The other bit of ineffectiveness is
a little bit more direct, and that is simply that somebody who's
receiving the results of an internet petition probably should ignore it.
I say that because internet petitions are so easy to spoof, to fake, to rig,
to basically make a specific desired outcome appear,
regardless of what the signers happened to say.
Somebody that's technically savvy on the receiving end
who understands how easy it is for internet petitions to go wrong
will probably say, Thank you very much for your input,
and then file that input in the garbage can.
And I can absolutely understand why.
Because internet petitions,
from their perspective, aren't necessarily trustworthy.
So I said that internet petitions do harm.
Here's why.
Let's say you fill out an internet petition.
You fill out an online petition at one of the legitimate sites.
And I'll talk about them because there are some.
But you fill one out at one of the legitimate sites.
Great. You feel like you've done something.
It's a weight off your shoulder.
You've made a difference, whether or not you have.
It has also prevented you from doing something else.
It hasn't actively prevented you from doing something else.
You certainly still could do something else.
But because you took action, you now feel less of a need to take other
action, other action that could potentially be more effective.
What do I mean by more effective? Well, generally,
the kinds of things in this scheme that are more effective are things like
writing a real letter, making a phone call, making a donation, making a visit.
Those kinds of things are all significantly more impactful than just
clicking on an internet petition and saying, Yeah, I signed it.
The people that are paying attention to the results know this.
They know that it takes more effort to write a letter or to make a phone call.
They know that it takes commitment to make a donation.
Therefore, those kinds of actions are generally taken more seriously
than this very easy to click and sign internet petition scenario.
Ultimately, if all you do is sign a petition and you might have done
something else, you've just harmed the very cause you're attempting to support.
Now, when I originally posted this article some years ago, I got a lot of pushback,
which is why I started by saying I'll get even more push back now.
Yes, there absolutely are some legitimate petition sites.
And in fact, if you look at the comments on the companion article for this video,
you will see that many commenters mentioned several different sites,
and there are some common threads amongst them.
I don't want to say that all internet petition sites are invalid or are scams.
They are not. There are good ones.
There are bad ones. There are mediocre ones.
None of them, good or bad,
have the same impact as actually taking some more significant action on your own.
Write a letter, make a phone call, make a donation, volunteer your time.
The fact that each one of these is more work is exactly why it's more effective.
Do you actually take the time?
It's clearly something that's much more important to you.
Anyone can click a link.
I hope this helps clarify the position.
For updates, for comments,
for many of those legitimate petition sites, visit
askleo.com/2430.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is
Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.