Religion
In reply to the discussion: Harvard president calls planned Black Mass 'abhorrent' [View all]struggle4progress
(118,566 posts)Back in February an online petition calling for an investigation into how a Russian Olympic skater won a gold medal gathered signatures at a rate between 30K/hr and 40K/hr
Using list servers, bulletin boards, email, and so on, it's possible to generate wide-spread attention to a topic in a short time. If you have a list of names and emails, you can send emails saying "Click here to sign" and folk can add themselves as signatories without doing anything more than a single mouse click; you can then direct them to another page "Thanks for signing! Please give us the names and emails of ten friends who you think will sign" and send all those folk the same email. Result: a big list of names of people who cared enough to twitch the mouse finger on a link -- though nobody can tell whether their concern goes much beyond twitching briefly. That's why nobody takes online polls and petitions very seriously