Last fall, as a 22-year-old nanny living in Washington, D.C., she was peeved by a new $5-a-month fee for debit cards announced by Bank of America, with other banks expected to follow.

A petition denouncing this practice gathered more than 100,000 signatures, leading Ecuador to close the clinics, announce a national advertising campaign against homophobia, and appoint a gay-rights activist as health minister. A 19-year-old college freshman in Idaho, Kelsey Crow, read the column and started a petition to free those journalists - and in no time gathered more than 4,000 signatures.ĭoes that matter? Does Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, care what a band of cyber citizens thinks of him? Skepticism is warranted, but so far petitions have seen some remarkable successes.Įcuador, for example, used to run a network of “clinics” where lesbians were sometimes abused in the guise of being made heterosexual. My next column was about journalists being brutalized in Ethiopian prisons. I learned that a petition on had gathered 86,000 signatures calling for the company to stop accepting adult ads. The opportunities for Web naming-and-shaming through caught my eye when I reported recently on sex traffickers who peddle teenage girls on. “These kids are really feeling the glow of making the world a better place. “It was exactly what the kids asked for - the kids were through the roof,” Wells told me, recalling the celebratory party that the children held during their snack break.

They demanded that Universal Studios “let the Lorax speak for the trees.” The petition went viral, quickly gathering more than 57,000 signatures, and the studio updated the movie site with the environmental message that the kids had dictated.

So last month they started a petition on, the go-to site for Web uprisings. But when the kids went to the movie’s Web site, they were crushed that the site seemed to ignore the environmental themes. Seuss story “The Lorax” and admired its emphasis on protecting nature, so they were delighted to hear that Universal Studios would be releasing a movie version in March. Take Ted Wells’s fourth-grade class in Brookline, Mass. And therein lies a story of how new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat some of the most powerful corporate and political interests around - by threatening the titans with the online equivalent of a tarring and feathering. A BATTLE between a class of fourth graders and a major movie studio would seem an unequal fight.

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