E-Petitions, Avoid Them

I received one of those E-petition things in my email. Many people get these and join right in thinking they are helping to further a good cause. They are not only not helping, they are hurting. Here is my response to the person who sent this to me. It explains how these things don't help anyone, but actually hurt the ones who are trying to help.



The biggest favor you could do for these people is to let this thing die here and now. Here is why. These petitions do nothing good. They are not legal and they are not valid. A petition has to have a signature. I mean handwritten. Here is what Snopes says.

Claim: Signing and circulating online petitions is an effective way of remedying important issues.
Status: False.
Origins: These past few years have seen the birth of an Internet phenomenon: the e-petition.

It offers instant comfort to those outraged by the latest ills of the world through its implicit assurance that affixing their names to a statement decrying a situation and demanding change will make a difference. That assurance is a severely flawed one for a multitude of reasons.
E-petitions, however, have one further shortcoming inherent to them that entirely undercut any value the same documents might have had in paper-and-ink form.

Paper-and-ink petitions are signed in a variety of handwriting styles, each unique to its signer. Consequently, signatures on a paper-and-ink petition cannot easily be faked else certain glaring similarities would show up in one entry after another.

E-petitions, however, come with no such assurance — the same person could have generated all of the signatures. Moreover, it takes little by way of programming skills to create a sequence of code that will randomly generate fake names, e-mail addresses, and cities (or whatever combination of same the e-petition calls for). Once written, such a program can be executed with a keystroke, resulting in the effortless generation of thousands upon thousands of "signatures."

Those in a position to influence anything know this and thus accord e-petitions only slightly more respect than they would a blank sheet of paper. Thus, even the best written, properly addressed, and lovingly delivered e-petitions whose every signature was scrupulously vetted by the petition's creator fall into the same vortex of disbelief at the receiving end that less carefully shepherded missives find themselves relegated to.

So why do people do this if it isn't any good?
Here is the reason on Snopes. And I wrote this for Snopes.

The biggest reason for these online petitions that end with an email address to send it to when it collects a certain number of signatures, is this.
Couple their request to send it to that email address (that is NOT the President's email) with the hundreds of email addresses at the top of this thing. You know that email address is going to go straight to a spammer. And that is the point of these things. To harvest email addresses for spammers. If people continue to fall for this scam (it had 335 names when I received it), this guy is going to get the email addresses of around 2,000 unsuspecting people.

Now that you know what this thing really does, do you want to help this spammer?

I don't.

Tramp