The Problem with Online Petitions

The ability of voicing your concern with just a few clicks may increase the amount of people speaking, but is sincerity the price of such convenience?


“SIGN THE PETITION!” bellows the first line of the Facebook post, setting the bombastic tone of the rest of the missive. A great number of such entreaties appeared in the lead up to Freshers Week, all prophesying the same tidings of doom: a new higher education bill, drafted by the Scottish equivalent of Dolores Umbridge, will bind the University into indentured servitude to the government and utterly dismantle the cherished institution of the Rector. But wait! You—yes, you—can, nay, must save the day! Just click here and sign this online petition: it’s your duty as a St Andrews student!

If I am exaggerating, it is because I want to do justice to the original’s alarmist tone. Note as well the implicit subtext: one ought to support unconditionally the Student Association’s online crusades. Both of these made me pause on the way to clicking the hyperlink, and I proceeded to think on the issue at length. Having done so, I have some questions of my own.

Of the nearly 4,000 signatories of the petition, how many took the time and effort to read the draft bill and its supporting documents? All 80 pages of them? I did, and I wager I’m in a minority, at least judging from the responses when I ask the question in person. No one, I trust, would sign a contract without reading all its content. Oughtn’t a petition (to Parliament no less!) be treated with the same rigour?

Moreover, I tried to find the parliamentary debates on the bill, only to discover that it is still in the earliest stage and isn’t due to be discussed by parliament for a few months. Why did our Union go to DEFCON 1 in response to a small blip on the radar? It asked its members to take a stand without having heard the reasoning of the drafters or seen the outcome of the Education Committee’s deliberations.

Regrettably, it increasingly appears that such overreactions are endemic to this latest exercise in collective democracy—the online petition. Granted, none of these problems are entirely new: as early as 1790, Edmund Burke wrote of vocal minorities using alarmist appeals to mobilise the masses. Yet I contend that moving the process online has made things much worse.

Firstly, the speed with which these petitions go viral has substantially shortened the duration of discussions and left very little time for serious contemplation of the issue. There is a definite impulse to just ‘get on with it,’ and after having the same link sent to you by 10 different people, it is tempting just to sign the blasted petition and get back to pontificating on the relative merits of Bake-Off contestants. Furthermore, it has now become easy to waste the time and resources of government offices with frivolous and dilatory requests. Examples are legion; I need only recall the 2013 petition asking the White House to spend $850 trillion on a Death Star.

Ultimately, though, there remains a fundamental, insurmountable difference between organising a real petition or letter campaign to Parliament and making one online, and it is a question of integrity and sincerity. It is the difference between calling David Cameron a tyrant or a murderer on Twitter and saying the same candidly to his face. One is an act that requires the effort to take a stand for your beliefs, and a willingness to accept all the risks attendant thereto—mockery, disdain, even bodily harm. The other is an empty, risk-free, costless click, the political equivalent of ‘Sure, why not?‘. It allows you to feel good about taking a principled stance, without actually having to take one.