Pros and Cons
The format makes it easy for people to make a petition at any time. Several websites allow anyone with computer access to make one to protest any cause, such as stopping construction or closure of a store. Because it is easy to set up, it can attract frivolous causes, or jokes framed in the ostensible form of a petition.
Online petitions may be abused if signers don't use real names, thus undermining its legitimacy. Verification, for example via a confirmation e-mail can prevent padding a petition with false names and e-mails. Many petition sites now have safeguards to match real world processes; such as local governments requiring protest groups to present petition signatures, plus their printed name, and a way to verify the signature (either with a phone number or identification number via a driver's license or a passport) to ensure that the signature is legitimate and not falsified by the protestors.
There are now several major web initiatives featuring online petitions, for example Change.org, Avaaz.org, and 38 Degrees. These are growing in popularity and ability to achieve political impact. The Economist comments that Avaaz has had "some spectacular successes", but raises questions about what objective measures can be used to assess "the reach of a global e-protest movement". Recently, several petitions on Change.org have been attributed the reversal of a United Airlines Dog Policy.
Some legitimate non-governmental organizations (NGOs) shun online petitions. Reasons include the paucity of examples of this form of petition achieving its objective. Critics frequently cite it as an example of slacktivism.
In February 2007 an online petition against road pricing and car tracking on the UK Prime Minister's own website attracted over 1.8 million e-signatures from a population of 60 million people. The site was official but experimental at the time. Shocked government ministers were unable to backtrack on the site's existence in the face of national news coverage of the phenomenon. The incident has demonstrated both the potential and pitfalls of online e-Government petitions. It remains to be seen if policy will be permanently affected.
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“Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)