Online Petitioning Through Data Exploration and What We Found There: A Dataset of Petitions from Avaaz.org

Abstract

The Internet has become a fundamental resource for activism as it facilitates political mobilization at a global scale. Petition platforms are a clear example of how thousands of people around the world can contribute to social change. Avaaz.org, with a presence in over 200 countries, is one of the most popular of this type. However, little research has focused on this platform, probably due to a lack of available data. In this work we retrieved more than 350K petitions, standardized their field values, and added new information using language detection and named-entity recognition. To motivate future research with this unique repository of global protest, we present a first exploration of the dataset. In particular, we examine how social media campaigning is related to the success of petitions, as well as some geographic and linguistic findings about the worldwide community of Avaaz.org. We conclude with example research questions that could be addressed with our dataset.

Accepted as a dataset paper at the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18). This preprint includes an additional appendix with the reasons, provided by Avaaz.org, about the anomalies detected when exploring the dataset. For academic purposes, please cite the ICWSM version