This document summarizes a study of online petitions from the platform Avaaz.org. The researchers collected data on 366,214 petitions to analyze patterns in authorship, social media sharing, languages, and geographic origins. They found heavy-tailed distributions for prolific authors and social media shares. Signatures and social shares were strongly correlated except for some Indonesian petitions with millions of signatures but few shares, likely due to a past technical bug. The data also provided evidence of multilingual countries and influence of global leaders. Future work could include bot detection, content analysis, and examining gender patterns in online petitioning.

1. Online Petitioning Through Data Exploration
and What We Found There:
A Dataset of Petitions from Avaaz.org
Pablo Aragón1,2
Diego Sáez-Trumper1
Miriam Redi3
Scott A. Hale4
Vicenç Gómez1
Andreas Kaltenbrunner1
1
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
2
Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya
3
King's College
4
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
The 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18) — Palo Alto. May 25-28, 2018

2. Petitioning
Petition signing is one of
the most popular political
activities with a history
extending back centuries
(Fox 2012).
2
Women hauling the partially unfurled (to 100 feet)
suffrage petition up the steps of the US Capitol in 1915.

3. Online Petitioning
The low-costs, low-barriers
to entry of online petitions
may bring new people into
the political process
(Margetts et al. 2015).
3

4. Previous data-driven research
4

5. Government platforms
Research using data from government platforms:
● Germany (Jungherr and Jürgens 2010; Lindner
and Riehm 2011),
● United Kingdom (Wright 2012; Hale, Margetts,
and Yasseri 2013; Wright 2015),
● United States (Dumas et al. 2015; Margetts et
al. 2015; Yasseri, Hale, and Margetts 2017).
These platforms are restricted by definition to
specific territories, and they do not take
advantage of the global scope of the Internet.
5

6. Global platforms
Research on Change.org has analyzed user
behavior (Huang et al. 2015), success factors
(Elnoshokaty, Deng, and Kwak 2016) and gender
patterns (Mellon et al. 2017). Unfortunately,
the API is no supported since October 2017.
Avaaz.org, the second largest online petition
platform being present in over 200 countries,
does not provide an open data API.
6

7. A Dataset of Petitions from Avaaz.org
7
Available at
https://dataverse.mpi-sws.org/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5072/FK2/CUSKCS

8. Structure of the dataset
366 214 petitions retrieved in August 2016 (petition pages
had a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license).
Original metadata Additional fields
title country_code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3)
description facebook_count
author twitter_count lang_code (Apache Nutch plugin)
date whatsapp_count lang_prob (Apache Nutch plugin)
sign email_count
target people (Stanford NER)
ratio country_name organizations (Stanford NER)
locations (Stanford NER)
miscellany (Stanford NER)
8

9. 9
Data Exploration and What We Found There

10. Distribution of authors
The distribution is heavy tailed.
The most prolific author (2,895 petitions)
is named “selenium s.”.
Avaaz.org confirmed it was
the result of an automated
test they performed…
this is also another evidence
of platform economies (beyond
Twitter and Facebook) affected
by the rise of social bots.
10

11. Social media campaigning
The distributions of social media shares are also heavy-tailed.
11

12. Social media campaigning
Signatures and social media shares are strongly correlated.
12
This is not the case for a
small subset of petitions
● with millions of signatures,
● with dozens of shares,
● written in Indonesian,
● authored by workers of
Avaaz.org
WHY?

13. Social media campaigning
Signatures and social media shares are strongly correlated.
13
This is not the case for a
small subset of petitions
● with millions of signatures,
● with dozens of shares,
● written in Indonesian
● authored by workers of
Avaaz.org
Because of a bug when linking new
petitions of ongoing campaigns.
This is fixed since June 2018.

14. Linguistic and geographical patterns
Evidence of (1) multilingual countries (Canada, Belgium, Argelia,
Morocco, Ukraine), (2) many English petitions in non English-speaking
countries, and (3) global leaders among the most named people.
14

15. Linguistic and geographical patterns
Evidence of (1) multilingual countries (Canada, Belgium, Argelia,
Morocco, Ukraine), (2) many English petitions in non English-speaking
countries, and (3) global leaders among the most named people.
15

16. Conclusions
16

17. Conclusion and future work (in progress)
17
The release of this dataset opens the path to address future work
Bot detection
- Automatic identification of bot petitioners
Content analysis
- The role of emotions for online petitioning
- The emergence of topics in global activism
- The different concerns between the existing
linguistic communities in the same country
Gender patterns
- The different motivations for men and women
to engage in online petitioning

18. Dumas, C. L.; LaManna, D.; Harrison, T. M.; Ravi, S.; Kotfila, C.; Gervais, N.; Hagen, L.; and Chen, F. 2015.
Examining political mobilization of online communities through e-petitioning behavior in We the People.
Big Data & Society 2(2):2053951715598170.
Elnoshokaty, A. S.; Deng, S.; and Kwak, D. H. 2016. Success factors of online petitions: Evidence from
Change.org. In 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 1979–1985.
Fox, R. 2012. What next for e-petitions. Hansard Society.
Hale, S. A.; Margetts, H.; and Yasseri, T. 2013. Petition growth and success rates on the UK No. 10 Downing
Street website. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci ’13, 132–138. New York,
NY, USA: ACM.
Huang, S.-W.; Suh, M. M.; Hill, B. M.; and Hsieh, G. 2015. How activists are both born and made: An analysis
of users on Change.org. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems, CHI ’15, 211–220. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Jungherr, A., and Jürgens, P. 2010. The political click: Political participation through e-petitions in
Germany. Policy & Internet 2(4):131–165.
References
18

19. References
Lindner, R., and Riehm, U. 2011. Broadening participation through e-petitions? an empirical study of
petitions to
the German parliament. Policy & Internet 3(1):1–23.
Margetts, H.; John, P.; Hale, S.; and Yasseri, T. 2015. Political turbulence: How social media shape
collective action. Princeton University Press.
Mellon, J.; Gilman, H. R.; Sjoberg, F. M.; and Peixoto, T. 2017. Gender and Political Mobilization Online:
Participation and Policy Success on a Global Petitioning Platform. In Saich, T., ed., Ash Center Occasional
Papers. Harvard Kennedy School.
Wright, S. 2012. Assessing (e-)democratic innovations: “democratic goods” and downing street e-petitions.
Journal of Information Technology & Politics 9(4):453–470.
Wright, S. 2015. Populism and downing street e-petitions: Connective action, hybridity, and the changing
nature of organizing. Political Communication 32(3):414–433.
Yasseri, T.; Hale, S. A.; and Margetts, H. Z. 2017. Rapid rise and decay in petition signing. EPJ Data
Science 6(1).
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20. 20
Thank you
@elaragon
https://elaragon.wordpress.com
pablo.aragon@upf.edu
Pablo Aragón, Diego Sáez-Trumper, Miriam Redi, Scott A. Hale, Vicenç Gómez, Andreas Kaltenbrunner