Online Petitions and their Social Media Ecosystem

In this work, we study and map the dynamics of online petitioning focusing on its interplay with social media platform's activity. The research provides a conceptual framework and insights that open new pathways for future social-media-based studies in the field. Rather than studying single petitions and petitioning issues as independent entities, as frequently done in literature, we here examine overall petition-related communication and promotion dynamics across time, issues, platforms, and as part of an online petitioning ecosystem. For this purpose, we employ X data in seven EU languages, published from February 2023 to December 2024. Our query targets a varied population of 84 petitioning platforms, some of which are generic and used across multiple EU languages and countries, like change.org and avaaz.org, and others that are specialized and country-specific, such as the French platform l214.com, which focuses on animal protection. Our dataset contains more than 160 thousand posts -published by about 75 thousand profiles-all of which refer through at least one URL in the post to one of the petition platforms' domains considered in our query. After a descriptive analysis and the presentation of some stylized facts related to petitioning activity on social media, we characterize more in depth the properties of our population and the issue coverage of our posts. Results suggest that petition-related activism on X tends to be highly issue-specific and short-lived, with only a small fraction of users maintaining long-term engagement on a single cause. We also observe that key political and social issues exhibit distinct patterns of engagement and reach, shaped by linguistic and ideological factors. Among others, we find that petitions related to Political Corruption, Political Authority, and Traditional Morality tend to be among the most engaging issues for right-leaning user groups on X. In contrast, Environmental Protection, while widely covered across EU languages, receives relatively low engagement in proportion to its coverage, especially among French right-leaning and German left-leaning communities. Finally, Democracy emerges as an important topic across many linguistic communities.