Last night, I edited the Save the Elephants Wikipedia page,
and it is still there today! I added a small blurb about their efforts using
Google Earth Outreach. Check it out (its at the bottom):
Since this was so easy, I wanted to add something on the
“internet petition” page as well.
Here I added (and cited) articles that talked about two petitions on change.org
whose petitions were successful in revoking a recent United Airline Dog Policy
and the forgiveness of a dead college student’s student loan. I put this in the “pros and cons”
section of the page as an example of a successful use of online petitions. Here is a screen shot of my edition (you can see it on the page too, hopefully it stays up!):
I actually learned quite a few things about other petition
sites that are similar to change.org, and the page had some cool examples of
uses of online petitions. One of
the most interesting petitions that they mentioned was actually created on the
whitehouse.gov petition site (created under the Obama administration) that asked
if the US had contact with aliens.
Since the rule was that the government would issue an official response once
a petition received more than 25,000 signatures, they were forced to respond
via the White House Office of Science and Technology (saying that no, they were
not in contact with aliens). I
didn’t know that this government page existed! I put a link below, it’s pretty interesting,
but also very similar to the other petition sites I have covered. The Wikipedia page also mentions
slacktivism A LOT, which is funny, because that is what I was going to originally
add on to the page. They cover the
topic pretty well, so that is why I added to the pros and cons page
instead.
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