Thesis linked to the implementation of the María de Maeztu Strategic Research Program.

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Back [TEXT] Online Petitioning Through Data Exploration and What We Found There: A Dataset of Petitions from Avaaz.org

The Internet has become a fundamental resource for activism as it facilitates political mobilization at a global scale. Petition platforms are a clear example of how thousands of people around the world can contribute to social change. Avaaz.org, with a presence in over 200 countries, is one of the most popular of this type. However, little research has focused on this platform, probably due to a lack of available data. To overcome this problem, we release an open dataset of petitions from Avaaz.org. It is important to highlight two issues. First, the machine-readable robots.txt file on Avaaz.org does not specify any restrictions. Second, every page fetched by the crawler specified a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License in the footnote. Therefore, the dataset is released under the same terms.

Associated publication and slides