the rize of online petition sites

Hi all.
This muse appeared tonight when I signed a petition on accessibility from change.org submitted to me by one of my blindness organisation email lists.
I was asked to contribute to the petition which I did the minimal amount.
This was to buy signatures.
Now from a lay point this is probably to cover distribution by the site or the petition writer.
But there are a lot of things wrong.
Firstly what validity do online petitions actually have.
Do they work.
Rumors are abound saying they are feel goods for users and do nothing but others say they do.
Obviously they must achieve something because why would they be continued to be created.
Not all are written rightly or for the right reasons however.
Assuming that these do work then fine we can stop with the first option.
But suppose they don’t.
Firstly they work we still have to find out what buying signatures actually means.
For a semi geek like myself or a lay person, it may mean contributing to costs.
But it also could be buying a signature or load of fake signatures or potential signatures.
Now it goes without saying there are email verifications and such in place but really if I created a bunch of fake email addresses I could probably spoof the system even if I didn’t verify myself I mean would that work or not, don’t know.
One thing is for sure if they don’t work, then I just gave my payment and email, name, address, and all my contact info to a site that may not even be in the us to someone in in who knows where to use how they wish.
At least its not my credit card.
What stops people just buying a signature.
For roughly 1000 dollars you can buy about 10000 signatures.
For 100000 you could potentially buy a million perhaps.
Point is for little cash I can buy my way in.
Now its probably not as easy as that but little bar one research paper into the echonomics of all this has been published.
This is an interesting muse and in the grand scheme of things is probably just that, a muse.
But what if it isn’t.
I don’t comment on to many articles here and haven’t written things but I had to correct spelling in an article so thought I’d do that.
And now I’m off to listen to a twitch broadcast.