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E-petitions have been creating a buzz lately with members of the public being encouraged through social media to sign various calls for parliamentary action.

The riots in particular spurred campaigns calling for rioters to lose their benefits and more recently a journalist and Liverpool Football Club fan has asked UK citizens to sign a petition supporting the full disclosure of documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

Although online petitioning is nothing new – with some forwarded via email and others with their own dedicated websites, as well as Downing Street’s former petition page – the is clearly laid out and straightforward to use; a sort of one-stop-shop for members of the public to browse, sign or create petitions.
and once it is checked by a government team – to ensure it meets certain guidelines – it is open to the public for one year. It must have 100,000 signatories to be considered for parliamentary debate, though the threshold will be reassessed if it appears that too few or too many are passing it.

Although a person’s details have to be provided, only the name of the petition’s creator, and not the signatories themselves is published on the site. This may help reduce the sense of peer pressure that can lead to some signing or not signing up.

With social media and celebrity followings though, there may be a fear that people will sign up to petitions simply to feel part of a large wave of public opinion, and not necessarily because they have given a certain topic their full consideration. There is also the risk that people will sign joke issues or even extreme ideas.

But even if more frivolous ideas do make it to Parliament it is unlikely MPs will seriously debate whether readers of certain newspapers should receive ‘tougher sentencing’ or whether there should be ‘a lifetime of state-sanctioned… ’. I may be wrong.

It is important to bear in mind with petitions that they are not surveys of the whole nation and can’t be viewed as sound evidence that there is sweeping public opinion in support of a certain campaign (unless, of course, the numbers reach tens of millions).Ìý

100,000 is just a fraction of a per cent of the 30 million people that turned out to vote in last year’s general election, but, nevertheless, it is still a very simple way of engaging a wider circle of people in political debate.

Read Guy Clapperton's blog on Getting political online.

Hajar is a regular contributor to the WebWise blog and has also made award-winning programmes for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio. In her spare time she loves reading, writing and singing.