Great QUESTion ! I’m not sure but I hope that they are because I get involved by signing these online petitions .
=)

I get email from Change.org all the time. Some I sign, like the one I got yesterday. James Cromwell started it. He’s asking that Walmart stop selling pork that comes from pigs raised in tiny pens that don’t even allow them the room to move or lie down.
I sign the ones that mean something. I hope it makes a difference, but I really don’t know whether or not it does.

It depends. A colleague of mine had success with a petition for his local county. The county was trying to deny gay veterans the right to march on Veteran’s Day. They successfully won via petition, but were prepared to go to court in the event that the petition was unsuccessful.

I think the mass scale petitions are less successfully. They can be useful if they have a very, very high target number, but the petition on its own (say for a federal issue) probably won’t impact much change. Still, I think that, if nothing else, online petitions are a successful grassroots information sharing system. Without online petitions many people would be uninformed that certain issues exist at all. The petition can at least alert them to look into the issue and decide whether they want to do anything about it.

Regardless of whether or not I think it would be successful, I still sign the petitions for issues that I care about and pass it forward to others who might be interested.

I got one in my inbox yesterday – a petition to Vladimir Putin to tell the world what happened to the now-missing member of Pussy Riot, who has apparently vanished from prison.

I sincerely doubt Putin cares about the internet petition.

@Seek_Kolinahr I agree about Putin on the Ritz.

I don’t think that they’re one bit effective.

Sorry to say I’ve never believed they accomplished much other than allowing like-minded people to join for or against a cause or issue they believe strongly in, and to contribute money if desired. Of course you wind up on email lists with half-lives only slightly less than plutonium.

I’m with @Pachyderm_In_The_Room. Knowing how easy it is to have multiple accounts and manipulate the system on the internet, I have little faith in on-line petitions. Still, I do them once in a great while.

Online petitions are good to create awareness about a subject, but at times it can be inaccurate. The main problem with online petitions are that most of them do not seem to have a final destination. They just keep circulating from person to person, and usually there’s no information about the person or agency who will submit the petition to the government agency or person whoever is supposed to receive them.

I used to think they might be. But I have one friend on Facebook who posts these on almost a daily basis, and I have to think… if there are this many petitions being circulated about things I kind of sort of agree with, how many more are there with opposing views? And how can they possibly be taken seriously if they are so common? I feel that petitions lose their efficacy with dilution.

E-petitions are generally about as valuable as the e-paper on which they exist.