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chain letter petitions
``` Against Chain-Letter Petitions on the Internet
Phil Agre pagre@ucsd.edu April 1996
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I am worried about chain letters on the Internet, and particularly about a type of political action alert that is structured as a chain-letter petition. These petitions typically encourage you to sign your name at the bottom, pass it along to many other people, and mail it to some address if your signature numbers some multiple of, say, 10. Recently this genus of chain letter has multiplied greatly. Most of the ones I have seen have been for liberal causes such as public broadcasting or gay rights. Although the Internet can be a powerful means of political expression, I will argue that these petitions are far worse than useless.
Most of them, for one thing, have been very badly designed. They usually have no cut-off date, source of background information, signature from the organization or individual who is sponsoring the alert, or instruction to post the alert only where appropriate. As a result, these alerts have caused a lot of disruption and annoyance all around the net, and it would not surprise me if the negative sentiment they cause outweighs the positive benefit of the actions they encourage.
This type of chain-letter petition can also counterproductively annoy the legislative staffers and other lowly individuals who are supposed to open the petitions when they arrive in the mail. The problem lies in the mathematics of Internet chain letters. The chain-letter format creates a branching tree, and the petitions that arrive in the staffer's mail represent paths from the root of the tree to some vertex whose depth is a multiple of 10. This means that some signatures will appear on large numbers of petitions. It also means that some signatures will never arrive in the staffer's office at all, namely those which appear on branches that die out before ever reaching the next multiple of 10 in depth. It is quite possible that such a petition might generate thousands of signatures that never reach their destination. Early on, the petition will get forwarded to most of the relevant mailing lists, so that the branching factor of the tree will be quite high. The result might be hundreds or thousands of separate petitions, one for every person who adds their signature. Every single one of those petitions will die out, causing that signature to go to waste, unless it finds its way through some chain of several more signatures and reaches the next multiple of 10.
This, however, is unlikely. The underlying problem is not the limited number of individuals willing to sign the petition but rather the limited number of venues in which those people can be found. Once an instance of a given petition has been posted to a given mailing list, it is unlikely that further instances of that petition will be posted to the same list. Let's say, for example, that ten thousand individuals would be motivated to sign the petition, but that the vast majority of those people subscribe to one of five mailing lists. It seems likely that an instance of the petition would appear on each of those five lists very quickly, resulting in ten thousand signatures, each giving rise to its own branch of the tree. Since the vast majority of the resulting petitions would not find its way to any further, additional venue in which likely signatories could be found, the result would be that very few if any of the signed petitions would ever be received in a legislative staffer's office, and those that did arrive would include a vanishing proportion of the actual signatures, consisting mostly of the same few signatures repeated over and over.
Now in practice one does see instances of such petitions with dozens of names on them. These are the lucky few survivors that have found their way around the net; looking at the patterns of signatures, they seem to have passed primarily through networks of individuals with small branching factors. If these petitions were much better designed, and if they carried instructions encouraging them to be passed to individuals and not to mailing lists, then it is possible that they would produce more efficient results. But even then, legislative staffers would receive numerous duplicate signatures.
It would be much better, in my opinion, to circulate well-designed action alerts that encourage people to take a more substantive action in support of the cause, for example by supplying them with the facts and arguments they need to write letters to the editor, call legislative offices on the phone, organize meetings on the topic in their community, and so on. Many fewer people may actually take these actions, but they will have a much greater impact than simply forwarding a lot of e-mail down the rabbitholes of the Internet.
For some suggestions about designing political action alerts that work, send mail to rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu with "Subject: archive send action-alerts". The very best action alerts are the ones issued by the Voters' Telecom Watch, vtw@vtw.org, http://www.vtw.org/
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