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 ...
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.
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