Electronic petitioning as online collective action: Examining the e-petitioning behavior of an extremist group in we the people

2.1 E-petitioning systems

Electronic petitioning systems have surfaced as a contemporary and potentially effective way for citizens to communicate with their governments about policy issues and have facilitated making public participation in policy discussions more easily accessible.

However, citizens’ rights to petition their governments are not new. The act of petitioning dates back to the 13th century and has long since been a way for people to communicate with local, national or parliamentary governments. With the advent of the Internet and advances in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), e-petitioning has emerged as a mechanism for citizens to participate in the policy-making process. Germany’s Bundestag’s e-petition system has demonstrated that these systems are at the “forefront of official, fully operational e-participation opportunities provided to citizens by governments and parliaments” (Lindner & Riehm, 2011, p. 1). The purpose of petitioning is to change public policy, demand officials to make statements, or induce public institutions to take action (Lindner & Riehm, 2011). E-petitioning provides a safe “playing field” for citizens to take part in the policy-making process and is well-suited for a representative democratic society (Lindner & Riehm, 2009; Bochel, 2012).

E-petitioning systems are typically designed with the purpose of enabling citizens to have some influence over decision-making in the policy process. Several studies of e-petitioning systems have examined whether such influence actually takes place, with mixed results. Macintosh et al. (2008) found the Public Petitions Committee in the Scottish Parliament system “useful in influencing politicians about issues considered important” (p. 10). The Scottish Parliament was also one of the two successful e-petitioning systems in Bochel’s (2012) study (the other being the Welsh Assembly). In other systems (the House of Commons and the Coalition in Scotland), there was evidence that the petitions had no effect at all on actual outcomes involving policy-making decisions (Bochel, 2012). In the case of the Royal Borough of Kingston, one of the first local authorities to implement e-petitioning in 2004, findings showed that citizen engagement had an impact on policy making decisions (Panagiotopoulos et al., 2010).

In the US system, a few successful e-petitions have been followed by actions that are consistent with those requested by the petitions, some with attribution to the petition. For example, the petition “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal.” was created on January 24, 2013 in response to the decision of the Library of Congress to remove cell phones from the exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The petition garnered 114,000 signatures within the 30-day threshold needed for a response from the Obama administration. The response included a plan of action that involved working with the FCC, wireless companies, and Congress to make unlocking cell phones legal. According to Ezra Mechaber (2015), Deputy Director of Email and Petitions at the time in the White House Office of Digital Strategy, the popularity of the e-petition (through signature accumulation), the concerted efforts of the White House policy team, FCC, and the wireless companies and the national attention by multiple media outlets encouraged both the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass legislation to legalize cell phone unlocking in March 2014. It was the first time an e-petition on the US platform apparently led to legislative change.

2.2 Online collective action

Collective action found a new vehicle online with the advent of the Internet. One of the earliest examples of online collective action and online protest using the Internet as a tool for organizing mobilization is the case of the Lotus Marketplace in 1990 (Gurak, 2003). Email and Usenet newsgroups (two of the earliest forms of online communication tools) were used to protest a compact disc (CD) called Marketplace: Households that Lotus Development Corporation revealed had the names, addresses, and expenditure behaviors of 120 million people from different households in the US (Gurak, 2003). The CD was intended to be sold to people who wanted to do direct marketing from home and who did not want to pay the high costs that direct market mailing companies were charging (Gurak, 2003). One of the more influential activists/protester on the email and Usenet newsgroups, Larry Seiler, sent a message to the email and Usenet newsgroups explaining that they should be worried about the fact that Lotus was selling their personal information to marketers (Gurak, 2003).

Seiler sent another message and over 30,000 people, who were on the email and Usenet newsgroups, contacted Lotus asking to have their names removed from their database (Gurak, 2003). Shortly after, Lotus responded by cancelling the release of the CD Marketplace: Households because of “public concerns and misunderstandings of the product, and the substantial, unexpected costs required to fully address consumer privacy issues” (Gurak, 1997, p. 66).

In 2011, several protests around the world surfaced beginning with rebellion in Tunisia and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the revolutions in dictatorship countries Egypt and Libya which became known as the Arab Spring (González-Bailón et al., 2013). Even democratic countries such as Spain, Greece, Chile, and the US experienced demonstrations against social injustice which collectively became the global Occupy movement in which thousands of people took to the streets in cities all over the world chanting the mantra “We are the 99%” (González-Bailón et al., 2013). In these protests, different strategies were used to mobilize people to participate in the movements, such as living in tents in public places and establishing local media facilities to enable the spread of the protest information via online networks, such as Twitter and Facebook (González-Bailón et al., 2013).

González-Bailón et al. (2013) conducted an empirical study of the information diffusion in the protest in Spain in May 2011, the Spanish indignados movement, using Twitter data with a focus on how new information and communication technologies decrease the costs of organizing and managing collective action. This movement provided an illustration of how the spread of information online frequently goes together with/complements or may incite the spread of offline behaviors (González-Bailón et al., 2013). Tens of thousands of people were mobilized online and organized to set up tents in public spaces in massive offline protest (González-Bailón et al., 2013). González-Bailón et al. argue that analyzing protest activity via the “lens of diffusion” ties collective action to “studies of social influence and interdependence in networks which are … better equipped to make sense of digital protests than classic approaches to the logic of collective action” (2013, p. 945).

Online networks help spread participation in collective action by allowing people to see who else has participated (González-Bailón et al., 2013) which may contribute to their decision to participate. There are different thresholds for individuals in regards to how many of the people in their networks need to participate before they decide to do so as well (Granovetter, 1978; Valente, 1996). Research studying the effects of social influence in online networks posits collective action as “more as a process of contagion than of incentive design” (González-Bailón et al., 2013, p. 947) which “makes collective action similar to other diffusion processes” (González-Bailón et al., 2013, p. 947). Their analyses shows that the development of “digitally born protests” is contingent on the tactical utilization of groups of people who are already connected and being able to take advantage of the prominent actors in the networks who are highly-connected (González-Bailón et al., 2013, p. 945).

2.3 E-petitioning and collective action

Bimber et al. state that there are three basic functions that are essential to all collective action: “(a) a means of identifying people with relevant, potential interests in the public good; (b) a means of communication messages commonly perceivable among them; and (c) a means of coordination, integrating, or synchronizing their contributions” (2005, p. 374). The costs of organizing individuals for collective action have been greatly reduced with the online information and communication technologies. The need for formal organization in collective action is not as necessary as it once was before the Internet especially when there is a network already in place using established online communication channels to pass along information instantly. As we saw in the case of the Lotus Marketplace, a large number of people, namely, 30,000, were mobilized to take action after reading a message that was sent to them online (by already established email or Usenet newsgroup networks). Gurak acknowledged that the people using these information and communication technologies to protest Lotus Marketplace were like-minded in that they were all computer savvy users and/or techies which, at this time, were a minority (2003). There was a sense of trust in the Internet protest network because the people writing and forwarding the messages were all part of a “common core of like-minded computer privacy advocates” who shared “common values about what “cyberspace” should be” (Gurak, 2003, p. 8).

Previous research on the US e-petitioning platform, We the People, found evidence that people signed more than one petition related to gun control laws after the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012. During the week (December 14–21) after the fatal shooting of 20 children and 6 school personnel by a lone gunman, 33 petitions were created. Of these, 12 were in favor of gun control laws and the other 21 were against gun control laws or offered alternative policy suggestions such as improvements in mental health, and putting armed guards in schools. Using market basket analysis and social network analysis, Dumas et al. (2015a: 2015b) analyzed the extent to which individuals who signed one petition in favor of a particular policy option, for example mental health care reform, also signed other petitions favoring the same policy suggestion. Dumas et al. (2015a: 2015b) found substantial patterns of co-signing of petitions proposing similar policy options, indicating that signers recognized similarities in the policy positions expressed, and endorsed multiple petitions with thematic similarities. These patterns of co-signing were also reflected in our network analyses of communities, which supported specific policy proposals that conformed to a particular theme. This study concluded that the signing of petitions related to Sandy Hook was used strategically by individuals to express opinions about and influence gun control policy in the future (Dumas et al., 2015a: 2015b). The results of these studies support claims that e-petition data can provide information about how collective political action can take place on e-petitioning platforms.

2.4 Social media promotion

WtP was created by the Obama Administration to be an innovative tool for online citizen engagement. The system was designed to make it easy for people to bring issues to the forefront of the policy making agenda and potentially have an effect on the policy making process. Users are encouraged to garner support for their petitions through social media via the “Promote this Petition” buttons for Twitter and Facebook on the petition pages. The initial petition creators spread the petition information to their personal online social networks which may or may not be shared with other online social networks of the individuals who also sign the petition; thus, resulting in a snowball effect.

Promoting e-petitions through online social networks is one way to gather support in the form of signatures. Research has shown that most people will not actively seek out e-petitions to sign; they are more apt to sign if they see e-petition information on their social networking sites when it initially appears (Gleason et al., 2013; Lin, 2013; Yasseri et al., 2014). Thus, an important design feature for platforms is to consider how to make it easy for e-petition creators and signers to disseminate links to the e-petitions via online social network sites, blogs, discussion forums, and email. By providing users with the ability to diffuse e-petition information online, the platform and its e-petitions will receive more exposure to the public and may result in more participation. Additionally, issues will get more attention from a larger population more quickly.

To better understand the social dynamics of e-petitioning behavior, researchers can examine the diffusion of e-petition information in online social networks. E-petition initiators have the opportunity to immediately spread information about their e-petition to their related social networks when they are given the option to use platform-provided access to Twitter and Facebook. Groups of people actively seeking support for an issue or cause and coming together for a common goal frequently engage in online collective action. E-petition signing patterns involving social networks can reveal one important form of online collective action. This information may be used by policy makers to understand which actors are influential in mobilizing online support for certain policy issues that are salient in the public sphere. Dumas et al.’s (2015a; 2015b) study of e-petitioning on We the People following the Sandy Hook tragedy used centrality measures and community detection algorithms to find core groups of people who were mobilizing for and against gun control laws. These studies provide evidence that individuals used the US platform to register their support for certain specific petitions that offered a particular policy option.

The Internet’s role in collective action within social media is apparent in enabling massive amounts of people, strangers in some cases, to come together to mobilize or participate online through petitioning or calling attention to issues via retweeting or hitting the “Like” button on Facebook (Margetts et al., 2013). Do people search for opportunities to mobilize or do they respond to messages virally spread through their online social networks? Social influence plays a role in signature accumulation and collective action (Margetts et al., 2016). People have varying thresholds for joining a mobilization, with some willing to join when numbers of other participants are very low (the leaders), while others will only join when there are large numbers already participating (the followers) (Gonzalez-Baillon et al., 2011). The diffusion of petition information from the e-petitioning platforms to individual’s personal online social networks needs to be explored further.

The petition data that is being used for this case study were obtained from a publicly available White House database containing information about all petitions and signatures (coded to ensure anonymity) appearing on the WtP website between Sept 22, 2011 and April 20, 2016. Petition titles and petition signatures are used in the analyses that follow. Within each dataset, a distinct signature ID consists of unique first and last initials followed by a five-digit zip code. Any ID that does not include a valid five-digit zip code has been eliminated.

The dataset for the white genocide petitions case study consists of petition data and signature data for 132 petitions created between on WtP between November 18, 2012 and March 30, 2016 that contain the phrase “white genocide” and that successfully achieved 150 signatures within 30 days, making them available for the public to see and sign (see Fig. 2). There are 47,059 total signatures with 31,520 that have valid zip codes. ( I acknowledge the possibility that a distinct ID of two initials and a zip code may reference more than one individual). There are 12,881 unique signature identification codes.

OPEN IN VIEWER

After reading the titles and the bodies of the 132 petitions, I found a set of 125 petitions which expressed opinions against what the petition creators are calling “White Genocide”. This set of 125 petitions will be referred to as Stop White Genocide (SWG) petitions. The other seven petitions appear to be created in response to one or more of the SWG petitions and will be referred to as Anti-SWG.

There are a total of 11,979 unique signature identifications in the 125 SWG petitions and 1212 unique signature identifications in the seven Anti-SWG petitions. There is an overlap of 255 unique signature identifications that signed both SWG and Anti-SWG petitions.

Table 1 includes six SWG petitions that were created in the month of February, 2013. These are examples of the petitions that were created monthly for almost four years. Petitions need to obtain 150 signatures in 30 days to be put on the website for the public to sign. Over the course of four years there were only four months where an SWG petition did not make it to the website. Table 1 is an example of a set of six petitions that were created during the month of February 2013. As Table 1 indicates, these petitions did not accumulate a large number of signatures. Additionally, these six SWG petitions were created on the same day within minutes of each other and by the same user, AD94705.

There were nine different users who created the 125 SWG petitions. The majority of the 125 SWG petitions were created by two users, AD94705 (80 petitions, 64%) and CM99201 (33 petitions, 26%). AD94705 initiated the first SWG petition on December 13, 2012 and created petitions on a monthly basis until July, 30, 2015 and then stopped. Five months later on January 1, 2015 CM99201 appears to take over and created the monthly petitions for a little over a year ending on February 29, 2016. Of the 12 remaining petitions beyond those created by AD94705 and CM9920, seven other different users created some of the other 125 SWG petitions.

The length of time between when a petition was created and when it became public on the website to be seen and signed varies, but for the most part is short. There were eleven petitions that became public within hours of the time they were created. For the rest of the petitions, the length of time between creation and becoming public ranges from one day to 18 days. The average length is 4.2 days for the 132 White genocide petitions to achieve the 150 signatures needed to become public for people to sign.

As mentioned previously, there were seven petitions in this dataset that appear to have been created in response to one or more of the SWG petitions and will be referred to as Anti-SWG. Table 2 shows the seven Anti-SWG petitions.