Don't sniff at clicktivism, says new British boss at Change.org
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Version 0 of 1. Clicktivism – using the internet to take direct action to achieve a political or social aim – could be one of the only ways we have left to change the world, a senior boss at Change.org has said. Simon Willis, the online petition site’s new British managing director for Europe, said the cynical “dinner party chatterati” sniffed at online petitions as the campaign style of the chronically lazy or the baying mob. “They sarcastically say things like: ‘Oooh, let’s start a petition on climate change, that’ll solve it’. I say, what is the alternative? You gave up on the Labour party after the Iraq war, you gave up on international development for doing more harm than good, you have stopped going on marches ... your only weapon left is whingeing about these bastards. That achieves nothing. But if I can get 300,000 people to care about social housing and beat a large corporation, that is something.” Willis, whose site has almost 100 million users worldwide, is talking about a bitter fight to save the residents of an estate in Hackney, north-east London, from evictions and a tripling of some people’s rent after American private equity firm Westbrook Partners bought the site in March last year. In December, after more than 349,000 people signed the Change.org petition and responded to calls to action via the site, New Era was bought by a charitable foundation, though the high-profile support of comedian-turned-campaigner Russell Brand may have been the clincher. Willis, who was previously CEO of the Young Foundation thinktank, which specialises in social innovation to tackle structural inequality, said before Change.org was created in 2007, there was “precious little interest in finding democratic ways to listen to single mums or parents of disabled children”. The site can, at the very least, share the credit for focusing attention on a death sentence for pregnant Sudanese Christian Meriam Ibrahim, or the imprisonment of British-Iranian Ghoncheh Ghavami. “Powerful individuals will complain that they are being defamed or bullied [on the site],” Willis said. “But we have to allow people to speak critically to power. Our default position is that ‘sack so-and-so’ petitions are fine, although there are shades between say, politicians and other individuals.” Change.org makes much of its neutrality – anyone can start one of its petitions. But repressive regimes can threaten those starting or signing petitions and block the site entirely, as happened in China following the setting up of a petition to free the artist Ai Weiwei after he was detained en route to Hong Kong in 2011. The site allows users to be anonymous and takes some precautions – its Russian arm is run from London. Willis said he would not rule out taking down a petition under pressure from a regime if it would otherwise mean citizens did not have access to Change.org at all. The site makes money from its users, although Willis insists it does not “flog email addresses to supermarkets”. It offers organisations sponsored petitions that users can sign once they have joined a grassroots campaign. It then passes on their details for a fee from the sponsoring body. Just such a partnership, with the Conservative party, was heavily criticised in the runup to the general election. “The Conservative party took up the offer more than the other parties, and we don’t pick one which is most on brand,” Willis said. “We are not here to tell you what you should campaign for or against, but we won’t have partnerships that would damage the platform.” That means rarely turning anyone away, other than obvious hate groups. “I don’t think a large petroleum company would ever approach us to get to our users,” Willis said. “They and we know it would be a waste of time.” That might be because of the more progressive leanings of the Change.org activists. In a YouGov survey of 10,000 of the site’s users, the most common political affiliation was with Labour, whose supporters accounted for 27% of users at the time of the 2015 election, but as might be expected, outsider parties are popular choices too: the Greens make up a fifth of users, and Ukip voters are close behind with 17%. |