Change.org

**Change.org** is a petition website operated by for-profit Change.org, Inc., an American certified B corporation which claims to have over 100 million users and hosts sponsored campaigns for organizations. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The website serves to facilitate petitions by the general public.

Corporations including Virgin America, and organizations such as Amnesty International and the Humane Society, pay the site to host and promote their petitions. Change.org's stated mission is to "empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see." Popular topics of Change.org petitions are economic and criminal justice, human rights, education, environmental protection, animals rights, health, and sustainable food.

## History

Change.org was launched on February 8, 2007, by current chief executive Ben Rattray, with the support of founding chief technology officer Mark Dimas, Darren Haas, and Adam Cheyer. As of February 2012, the site had 100 employees with offices on four continents. By the end of 2012, Rattray stated "he plans to have offices in 20 countries and to operate in several more languages, including Arabic and Chinese." In May 2013, the company announced a $15 million round of investment led by Omidyar Network and said it has 170 staff members in 18 countries.

In 2011, Change.org claimed it was the subject of a distributed denial of service attack by "Chinese hackers", and that the alleged attack was apparently related to its petition to the Chinese government to release artist Ai Weiwei. In 2011, there was a proposal to merge the Spanish-speaking counterpart website Actuable into Change.org. It took place in 2012 when they approved the voluntary union of Actuable users into the Change.org platform.

In 2012, Arizona State University decided to block access to Change.org in response to a petition created by student Eric Haywood protesting "rising tuition costs at the school". University officials claimed that "Change.org is a spam site" and the blocking was conducted "to protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research, and administrative uses".

It was reported on April 5, 2012, that Change.org hit 10 million members, and was the fastest-growing social action platform on the web. At that time, they were receiving 500 new petitions per day. On May 13, 2012, The Guardian, BBC News and other sources reported that Change.org would launch a UK-specific platform for petitions, placing Change.org in competition with 38 Degrees, a British not-for-profit political-activism organization.

An August 2013 Fast Company article reported that Change.org would soon begin featuring petition recipients, saying, "For the first time, companies will be able to post a public response to any given petition (currently, they can only respond to the person who started the campaign). They will also be able to create their own Decision Maker page, which will show all petitions against them, the number of signatures gathered, and their statuses." In summer 2017, a petition on change.org called for /r/incels (incel named after an abbreviation for "involuntary celibate") to be banned for inciting violence against women.

## Policy against cyber-bullying and harassment

In August 2016, a user started petitions consisting cyber-bullying and offensive actions against one individual. Each petition was reported and taken down one after another, but the perpetrator continued to set up more petitions, with most of them showing stolen personal information. The victim fought back with petitions to speak the truth about the cyber-stalker. As on June 10, 2018, the cyber-stalker has set up over 10 petitions solely consisting personal information and attempts of defamation, with most of them being taken down.