Ask John: Do Online Petitions Work?

Question:
One of my friends is starting a petition to “Save anime from being chopped up and KILLED by FUNimation!” She’s all ready got roughly 50 signatures and only started yesterday. I was wondering if this could possibly work or has worked before?

Answer:
According to generally held belief, internet petitions have almost no influence and generally aren’t taken very seriously. The veracity of online petitions is virtually always suspect because it’s often difficult to be certain that a small handful of people haven’t inflated the petition by adding their names multiple times. Furthermore, and more importantly, internet petitions are intangible. They don’t have the same weight and immediate impact that letter writing campaigns do because while a letter writing campaign generates mailbags full of letters that executives can see and hold and read, internet petitions result in nothing more than a statement that “X number of people signed this online petition.” Generally, because online petitions aren’t physical and tangible, and because they require virtually no effort to participate in (unlike snail-mail letter writing campaigns), they’re often just not taken seriously.

Furthermore, petitions of any kind generally need a staggering number of signatures to be influential. In the anime community, there are only two petitions that I’m aware of that are acknowledged as having been successful: the petition to encourage Beuna Vista to add a subtitle track to the American Princess Mononoke DVD, and the “Uncut Kite” petition. The Princess Mononoke petition was successful because it drew over 100,000 signatures and thousands of letters mailed to Disney executives. The Kite petition is considered successful for having resulted in the American release of the Kite Director’s Cut, but it’s arguable that a less heavily edited version of Kite would have been released eventually anyway.

It’s definitely possible for an online petition to achieve its goals and any method of fans making their opinions heard is positive, but for each online petition that succeeds, there are a dozen or more that don’t. But beyond the limited potential for success any online petition has, you may want to examine yours in particular to certify that it’s actually protesting something that needs to be addressed and actually has some potential for success. You may be attacking the wrong target. It’s true that some of the anime which FUNimation distributes has edited for American television broadcast, but that editing is not FUNimation’s fault. The blame for edited anime aired on American television should be placed on American television networks and governmental FCC standards that FUNimation has no control over. So far, all of the anime DVDs that FUNimation has released itself, from Dragonball to Yu Yu Hakusho to Fruits Basket and Blue Gender, has either been unaltered or released in separate edited and unedited versions.