17 June 2003
Are e-petitions and activism effective?
CLICK HERE and your voice will join the tens of thousands pressuring the American government to disclose their handling of the humanitarian crisis in the Gulf. Online petitions are a vital part of the new wave of activism; speed and the ability to reach international audiences and large numbers make web petitions invaluable in garnering public awareness and consolidating support for activist causes.
by Sheralyn Tay

TECHNO-THEORIST AND CO-FOUNDER of Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Stefan Wray, calls this sort of involvement extraparliamentarian direct action Net politics. It simply means the grassroots politics of social movements that use the Internet. Organisations like Amnesty International have had long history of petition writing. With email, people can participate much more readily.

The ongoing Use Your Freedoms campaign by Amnesty International Australia is an online petition campaign. It fights for the freedom of 'prisoners of conscience'; people who have been imprisoned for expressing their views; people like 32-year-old Le Chi Quang, jailed by Vietnamese authorities for publishing a document about China-Vietnam border agreements on the Internet; people like Rebiya Kadeer, detained for sending newspaper cuttings from China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to her husband in the US.

But do they work? Search for 'effect of online petitions' on Google and one of the first few hits will be the petition to stop online petitions. Oh, the irony. Cheekiness aside, it is a wry reality check reminding us to consider the effectiveness of online petitions and online activism.

Success Stories
In Future Active, Graham Meikle studies examples of successful net campaigns. The Zapatistas movement is heralded as one of the first campaigns to use the Internet to draw international attention to their cause. Social theorist Manuel Castells calls the campaign the "first informational guerrilla movement". The Zapatista's use of the Net to send out emails, alerts and news allowed them to frame the event in their own terms and galvanise support from activists and NGOs around the world.

In 1998, an email sent over the Christmas break called for the urgent attention to the plight of Chinese labour activist Zhang Shanguang. Zhang was to be trialled for treason for organising protests for laid-off workers. The penalty for treason in China is death. Eric Lee, who runs the trade unionist website, LabourStart in the UK had seen the story on the BBC website and knew immediate action had to be taken. He sent out a mass email to the LabourStart list pleading for action.

Says Lee in the book, "within minutes I had the first message. A group in South Africa sent a protest message. Then a group of activists in Sheffield contacted their local Member for the European Parliament. Then the co-ordinator of Austrian LabourNet translated my message into German and sent it to trade union contacts, as well as sending a faxed protest to the Chinese embassy in Vienna." The email also reached Swedish and Canadian unions who reacted. Zhang was not sentenced to death, but ten years imprisonment. "Not fun, but better than death," says Lee, who credits the web for the speed and reach of the protest.

Successful Spam
This is kind of reach has its benefits, but the snowball effect can also turn on whatever email campaign into mere spam. The website TruthorFiction reveals that often, these email petitions have no final destination, or have been long shut down and are just doomed to circulate the web and fill up more inboxes. Website-based online petitions often carry more weight, but some of these are just clever ways to collect marketing information. TruthorFiction warns users to question the reasons behind any petition.

Like all things on the net, there is an element of transience, so it is always a good idea to check up the legitimacy of any web-based petition.

Strategic, not Sweeping Use
How do we measure success of web-based petitions? Gabrielle Kuiper, one of the founding members of Indymedia in Sydney says that "Whether or not something is effective as activist action is only partly related to the quality of the action. A lot of it's also dependent on the circumstances. If you're trying to do something about Reconciliation and war breaks out in Iraq, you're not going to get into the newspapers. And unfortunately, a lot of our political processes are fairly driven by what's in the media and opinion polls."

For herself, "successful action is one that gets people thinking about something in a different way. If you challenge people, if you humour them, if you confront them, or if you just reveal something that people haven't known before, then it's successful." It is all fairly dependent on the goals of the campaign as well, she thinks online activism is just another way of communicating and is useful only to the extent that it reaches its intended audience.

This is what Wray argues in his essay Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hactivism. He writes, "Political and tactical effectiveness are closely intertwined." What is effective depends on how effectiveness is defined. "If the desired goal of hacktivism is to draw attention to particular issues by engaging in actions that are unusual and will attract some degree of media coverage, then effectiveness can be seen as being high. If, however, effectiveness is measured in terms of assessing the actions ability to be a catalyst for fomenting a more profound mobilization of people, then probably these new techniques are not effective."

New Tools for the Changing World
Online petitions and emails are just some of these new techniques in the tactical toolbox of hactivism. A representative from The Greens finds that the political power of online petitions is "considerable" and reveals that the party does use them as a political tool. "I think things have changed a little in the way emails have the same weight as a fax or a letter to a politician," says documentary-maker, Ian Walker. "Politicians count faxes and letters in their reckoning of feedback and they do actually apparently do count emails now. They don't just write them off as a subset of disgruntled people".

Use Your Freedoms, launched on 29 May was the first time Amnesty used Internet petitioning as a tool for its human rights work. That day, the petition was for Vietnamese law graduate Le Chi. Katrina Curry, Amnesty's regional coordinator for New South Wales was greatly heartened by the response. "It was a really positive one, and there was a great response from the Vietnamese community. There were maybe two older men, in their 60s [who participated] and it was their first time using the Internet."

In its initial days, the campaign gathered 4,440 petitions, all online. While its effectiveness is yet to be determined, Curry believes that the movement will sustain international pressure. "It will be a reminder to the Vietnamese government that they cannot get away with this sort of human rights infringement," she says. It is this strong wall of international public opinion against human rights violations that seems to contribute to the safety and sometimes release of prisoners or conscience, according to Amnesty.

The impact of public opinion on political decisions is not often successful; the impotence of the recent world-wide anti-war rallies seems to belie the potential and efficacy of activism, whether online or not. Though the numbers were there, the political strength wasn't and the war still went ahead, much to the frustration and dismay of many around the world.

A Question of Effectiveness
Does the failure of the protests mark a bleaker future for activism in general? Walker admits when it came to the war, "numbers didn't matter". He questions, "what kind of a democracy do we live in, when our politicians don't listen to what we're saying. So many Australians were against the war and we still went." He shrugs, "It says volumes about the way we think we live in a democracy."

Kuiper is not so quick to denounce the ineffectiveness of the movement, "You can say it didn't work because the war still went ahead. But I suspect it changed the way a number of people's attitudes towards the government and the fact that it was so stark that they weren't prepared to listen and they would dismiss what the majority of the Australian public thought so I think it's probably too early to judge the consequences. I think it will mean if there is another similar event, people will be more organised and more prepared to go, 'Okay, well, we weren't listened to the last time. We need to be out there and be louder next time'."

They both admit online petitioning and web-based activism will never take the place of real human presence. "The only thing that will stop a tank is a body in front of it. You can shut down all the websites you like, but it's not going to stop a tank," Walker says. Likewise, Curry says, "the personal aspect is still important; and the Internet is its best complimentary mechanism."