Online petitions revisited

[lethargic_man]

A number of people protested that online petitions don't work to influence events, when I posted about them a while ago.

I'm not sure that's true; recently I've read about:

• BBC News article about Coca-Cola removing a controversial ingredient from its drinks following a petition with 207,000 signatures on Change.org.
• The success of a 106,000-signature petition on Change.org by Nicola Blackwood MP to stop child sexual exploitation; now made law.
• The success of a 134,000-signature petition on Change.org to gain legal aid for the inquest into the death of the petitioner's mother, Cherry Groce, who was shot and paralysed by police, sparking the 1985 Brixton riots.
• The success of a Greenpeace campaign involving a 85,000-signature petition, 7,600 letters of complaint, and 1850 tweets to get Tesco to stop giving shelf space to Oriental and Pacific tinned tuna, caught using destructive methods resulting in large amounts of bycatch of sharks, rays, turtles, etc.
• The success of a 234,000-signature petition on Change.org by schoolgirl Fahma Mohamed to get the Education Secretary to inform schools about female genital mutilation, to help intervene to stop pupils of theirs being taken abroad to be cut.
• The success, last year, of a campaign to get the government to drop it's "snooper's charter" that involved, at 38 Degrees.org.uk, a 200,000-signature petition, amongst other measures.
• A 150,000-signature Change.org petition to water down the government's planned powers to close hospitals resulted in success in the House of Lords; Baroness Finlay said: “The campaign to achieve this would not have been as effective without the support of 38 Degrees members.”

Of course, some of these relied upon campaigning techniques other than just online petitions, but the petitions were part and parcel of them, as the quote in the last one demonstrates.