We learn so much on the internet.
And, every so often, we’ll read a horrifying account of cruelty or unfairness which makes our blood boil. It’s accompanied by a petition to help put things right, and we sign up gladly.
So, what happens after we sign the petition?
Within hours – or seconds – we’ll be deluged with requests to sign other petitions. For topics completely unrelated to the cause we chose to support. For problems we didn’t know existed, political issues we never felt strongly about and things we didn’t previously want to save or prevent.
After all, we’re warm-hearted, caring people – we must have an opinion about dolphin-smuggling in the rainforest, homeless elephants with breast cancer, or transgender supertankers in prison.
Perhaps we’re too ready to be persuaded that our gut reaction is a reasoned decision. We haven’t really considered the issues or researched the statistics, but it feels like a bad thing.
We don’t bother to check other websites to discover if these people or situations really exist, or carry out a quick Google search to see if there’s another side to the argument.
No, we see a picture of a sad-looking animal, an area of beautiful countryside or some grimy, malnourished children, flick our eyes over some tale of mistreatment abroad or a risk to the environment, and click Sign Petition without a second thought.
What’s the harm, right?
After all, we’re assured that, even if we don’t know the facts, they do and 5,427 other people agree with them, so it must be the right course of action. They’re not asking for money; all they need is our support for these poor, innocent victims.
What we don’t realise is that we’ve become victims ourselves – victims of this online rent-a-mob culture. We are being cynically manipulated by these groups and individuals who seek our support for every cause they believe in, and we’re letting them get away with it.
These petition sites aren’t charities, generously providing a service – they are multi-million-dollar businesses, making a fortune from the placement of advertising on their web pages. Their users are helping to build up their site by adding thousands of pages free, while they sit back and collect the dosh.
There are undoubtedly tragic situations where powerless individuals are treated unfairly, and organised shows of support in the form of petitions and public demonstrations can sometimes change the actions of governments. That doesn’t mean 100,000 lemmings can’t be wrong.
So often, we’re being pushed into signing our name to opinions we don’t really hold, and unthinkingly putting pressure on governments to carry out actions which unbiased research may show to be unwise.
Some of these petitions target individuals and companies, aiming to force employers to sack someone, encouraging customers to boycott a business or attempting to pressurise law-enforcement agencies to prosecute an alleged criminal with more serious charges – so much for ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
A quick squint at the demographics on these petition sites shows that the creators of their petitions have, in general, a standard of education well below average. That’s not to suggest they don’t know what they’re talking about, but it’s certainly possible some of them may not be as well-informed as they believe they are.
Unless we check out every case thoroughly before we give our support, we could be perpetrating the very unfairness we seek to prevent.
We don’t have the time or resources to do this research, but our governments do. We’ve employed them to investigate the facts and make the decision for us based on consideration of the priorities of the majority of citizens, rather than a few vocal individuals; unless we have concrete evidence that they aren’t doing so in each separate instance, we should let them get on with governing our country instead of interfering.
Let’s not forget that emotive language and heart-wrenching stories do not, in themselves, constitute truth.