In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde: "an online petition is the last refuge of a scoundrel".
It has all of the not-really-part-of-the-democratic-process of gluing yourself to the highway with none of the excitement and disruption to commerce. It has all the thrill of writing to your local MEP with none of the slight chance they'll notice. It's just as legally binding as a voxpop, but at least you can't write those off as "just a load of bots" (yet).
It's such a good way of electorally screaming into a pillow that the US and UK governments made official sites where you can officially be ignored by official officials.
I'm totally behind the cause, and have been in contact with my national and EU representative on the issue. I applaud any effort to promote human rights, particularly in a way that's so relevant to the lives of most of the population.
Nevertheless I see online petitions as at best a viral marketing jape and at worst a List of Dissenters that the dissenters themselves put together and hand you.
FWIW, I signed.
Does this even have any legal grounds?
I mean even if 1 million people signed, they're not required to take any action, because it's not official.
AFAIK there needs to be an initiative, don't ask me for the correct wording, some official initiative and if after idk how long there are no 1 million signatures it will always auto fail every time someone attempts the same topic.
It is just a petition - basically meant to be something for the legislators to consider. AFAIK the new "coerced consent" version of chat control has not been officially proposed yet. We'll see in the coming weeks if the EU council actually tries to push it forward, and even if they do there is a pretty high change it falls through due to being fundamentally incompatible with the constitution of many european countries and / or the parliament voting against it.
