Electronic Petitions

(Last change: 12 January 1999.)

Email petitions. How could anyone think they're bad? They respond to real-world situations; they cry out against injustice. Isn't that good?

Unfortunately, no.

There are numerous problems with pass-it-along email petitions:

• Truth. It's impossible to tell whether a given petition is for real, or whether it's an attempt to fill up someone else's emailbox. How do you know that the petition was created by the supposed originator?

• Organization. The petitions invariably say that if you're person #x to sign, you should send a copy back to the originator. Imagine you're person #499 on the list. You send it to ten friends. Each of them sign it and send a copy back to the originator. The originator now has ten copies of each of the first 499 names. It would take fairly sophisticated software to reliably merge all the lists into one list with no repetitions; I suspect most petition originators don't consider the amount of work involved in merging them.

• Verifiability. Even if they do merge the lists into one, what good will it do them? In a written petition, you have actual signatures (and often residence addresses) for the signers. In an email petition, you've just got a list of names. There's no guarantee that any of those names correspond to real people.

• Volume. Of course, the originators will never get a chance to examine the lists, because any time you ask the Internet at large to send you email, you stand a good chance of overwhelming your service provider. Your account will almost certainly be shut down within a couple of days after the replies start coming in. The number of messages involved is enormous.

• Expiration. And of course, as with Craig Shergold and such, there's never an expiration date on these petitions. (And if there is when they start, it often gets removed during forwarding.) They could circulate for years. In fact, they do: I still receive copies of the "Save PBS!" petition every few months.

If you want to do good, it's far more effective to directly call or write to the politicians or companies in questionespecially if you hand-write your own letter on actual paper. People in power are far more impressed by handwritten letters than by an emailed list of names.

I've tried on numerous occasions to contact the originators of petitions to make sure that my above qualms were justified. I've never received a response from an originator; usually mail to the given address bounces, indicating that the originator's account has already been shut down. But I have received one automated response from a system administrator, after the recent (as of this writing) Brandeis save-the-Afghani-women email petition. The automated response verified all of my points above. It added:

If you wish to learn how to do something productive about women's rights in Afghanistan, please refer to the web sites run by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Feminist Majority...

The latter is sponsoring a real petition which should be sent only via physical mail or fax, where it might have some effect. Virtual signatures are virtually useless at best, and at worst lull people into believing that no real action is needed. The text you received was mostly plagiarized from the real petition (without credit or reference), but is different enough that it can not be accepted (regardless of how the "signatures" were gathered).

For information on why Internet chain letters are never sanctioned by any responsible organization, please refer to:

• The end of the "Stop French nuclear testing!" petition
• The "Little Jessica" cancer chain letter
• The Make-A-Wish Foundation's information on Craig Shergold and Ryan McGhee
• Analyzing the Timothy Flyte chain letter
• CIAC's chain letters page