Avaaz: activism or 'slacktivism'?

Rupert Murdoch picks his massive nose, opens the door of the taxi, and steps outside to greet the bank of photographers, protesters and police officers massed next to Portcullis House, Westminster. It is half past one on Tuesday, and Murdoch – along with his son James – will shortly be interrogated for three hours by MPs inside the building. So far so good: he smiles at the crowd, pauses for photographs, and strides towards the revolving doors.

But something's up, starting with that nose. It's unnaturally ginormous. And so too are his eyes, ears and cheeks. Has Murdoch got mumps? And why is his chaperone carrying a placard that reads: "Murdoch: Wanted For News Crimes"?

A little secret, then. Clad in an oversized cartoon mask, "Murdoch" is actually Sam Barratt – UK media director of online pressure group Avaaz. The placard-bearing accomplice is his colleague Amy Barry, and this surreal moment constitutes the latest in a series of Avaaz-led protests against Rupert Murdoch's stranglehold on British media. In recent weeks, these puppets have been a frequent sight around Parliament Square, and have also made their way to News International's Wapping offices, and the department for culture, media and sport (DCMS). It's hard work, protesting. The mask – created by two sympathetic theatre prop designers – is a few centimetres thick, weighs several kilograms, and is seemingly impregnable to sound. "Can you hear me?" Barry asks Barratt. Silence. "Sam?" Sam says nothing, and picks his massive nose.

Founded in 2007, Avaaz is not primarily known for this kind of direct action, or indeed any action outside of cyberspace. To most people, Avaaz is just the group that organises all those online petitions; that corrals anyone with access to the internet and a conscience into emailing politicians on subjects that range from homophobia in Uganda, to the EU ban on GM crops and political corruption in Brazil. In the process, Avaaz – which means "voice" in Farsi and other languages – has established quite a following. Nearly 10 million people across 193 countries have now taken part in its nigh-on 46m "actions" (as the group calls the emails, phonecalls, fundraisers and rallies undertaken in its name).

Part of its success is down to the ease with which you can get involved. Once you access the site, and find a petition that's of interest, adding your voice to the campaign is as simple as typing in your email address. This simple gesture has the dual effect of a) sending the petition's target a standard-form message in your name, and b) subscribing you to alerts about future Avaaz campaigns. If there's a campaign you're particularly fond of, you can also quickly spread the word by clicking on the social media tabs; this in turn will post details about the petition on your Facebook wall or Twitter feed.

So clicktivism – as Avaaz's brand of online activism is sometimes known – is easy. So easy, in fact, that it often gets a bad press. Cynics argue that signing an online petition, like joining a Facebook group, takes mere seconds, achieves little, and doesn't encourage clicktivists to engage properly with the issues concerned. Sites such as Avaaz, suggested Micah White in the Guardian last year, often only deal with middle-of-the-road causes, to the exclusion of niche interests: "They are the Walmart of activism . . . and silence underfunded radical voices." More infamously, internet theorist Evgeny Morozov has called the likes of Avaaz "slacktivists", claiming that they encourage previously tenacious activists to become lazy and complacent.

There's also the issue of breadth. Clicktivist websites often cover a range of issues that have little thematic or geographical relation to each other, which leaves them open to accusations of dilettantism.

But Avaaz begs to differ. It argues that its work has both greatly engaged the public, and had comprehensive effects that extend far beyond cyberspace. For evidence, the group points no further than its anti-Murdoch campaign. "Our activism played a critical role in delaying the BSkyB deal until the recent scandal was able to kill it," Avaaz's founder, New York-based Ricken Patel, tells me via Skype. Last November, in collaboration with 38 Degrees, a similar online campaign group, Avaaz sent 60,000 complaints to Ofcom during its initial review of the BSkyB merger. Through the winter, Avaaz kept chipping away, shifting its aim on to David Cameron and culture minister Jeremy Hunt. Shortly before the New Year, 50,000 of its 700,000 British members sent the pair messages that called for a full investigation into the deal. In early March, after Jeremy Hunt decided that the merger would not compromise Sky's editorial independence, Avaaz mobilised another 40,000 complaints (which all had to be read by DCMS officials) and organised several stunts, including pickets outside the Royal Courts of Justice and Hunt's constituency surgery. Avaaz argues that this – coupled with its 160,000-strong petition in early July – led to the merger decision being delayed until September, then referred to the Competitions Commission, and finally junked by Murdoch altogether.

The whole operation is meticulously planned. I sit in on a 90-minute, intercontinental Skype conference call (one of two held each week between the 20-odd core Avaaz activists) and the level of detail at which they discuss the day-to-day minutiae of each local campaign is impressive. There's a brisk debate between activists in New York and Majorca about what kind of signage the London protest team should be using, and what each sign should say. Banner or placard? "News criminal", or "news crime"? Everything is decided methodically and quickly until, at the end of the session, 2,000 words of minutes have been compiled, on issues ranging from Palestinian independence, Indian corruption, and, naturally, British journalism.

Of course, Avaaz isn't the only clicktivist group at work. 38 Degrees, as mentioned, also ran its own campaign, while a new group, Hacked Off, pushed for a full judicial inquiry into wrongdoing at News International. And as more and more revelations emerged about the News of the World's conduct in the early part of the past decade, leftwing blogs such as Liberal Conspiracy, Political Scrapbook, and individuals such as Melissa Harrison began to encourage people to email and tweet the News of the World's advertisers, and ask them to boycott the paper. As with Avaaz's actions, this brand of online activism seemed to have a very real effect: within two days, all but four main NoW advertisers (Tesco, Mars, British Gas, and, unsurprisingly, Sky) had pulled their support, and the paper soon folded.

But it's Avaaz, perhaps due to its size, that has won the most plaudits. "Avaaz has been hugely significant," says Labour peer David Puttnam, and he should know. In 2002, Puttnam played a key role in the formation of the communications bill, the legislation that governed the BSkyB merger. "This was not a bunch of yahoos marching up and down," Puttnam adds. "This was hugely thought through." Indeed, Avaaz's tactics went much further than just online petitions. They took out adverts criticising Murdoch in the Financial Times, the Daily Mail and various newspapers in Hunt's Surrey constituency. They also paid – out of money raised solely from donations – for three separate pieces of legal advice that detailed how best to challenge the merger. The first picked holes in Hunt's initial judgment; the second investigated the possibility of a judicial review; the third explored whether the deal could be blocked by staging a quasi-takeover of BSkyB. (If the worst came to the worst, Avaaz planned to ask its members to buy shares in the company; a numerical majority of shareholders could then have voted down the takeover.) Other legal depositions were made jointly by Trinity Mirror, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group, BT and Associated Newspapers. But, according to Barratt, the Murdoch impersonator, without Avaaz's work "the deal probably would have gone through a month earlier". Meanwhile, argues Puttnam, as a result of Avaaz's campaign, "the process of government will never be the same again. Any responsible government adviser will now have to factor in the possibility of a crowd-sourced legal action before making a similar decision."

Not everyone agrees on the power of the online pressure group. "Angry about racism, the war in Afghanistan and foie gras?" asked a sarcastic Rod Liddle last week in an article about Avaaz's clicktivist ally, 38 Degrees. "Just press a key and they're gone – congratulations!" But Patel thinks this kind of debate misses the point. "It's important to look beyond the technology," he says. "You click when you go on iTunes or eBay, but nobody disputes that these sites have changed commerce." In any case, one protester outside parliament points out, the fact that Avaaz is online-based allows people with mobility problems to stay politically involved. "I'm still fit enough to go to the demonstrations," says north Londoner Thelma Stone, 68. "But my husband isn't."

Patel also feels it's unfair to suggest Avaaz is too middle-of-the-road, or unengaged with niche issues. When Avaaz was founded, he did initially fear it would be "dishwater-centrist, never taking a side or a stance". But four years on, he argues, they're often fighting quirky, unexpected campaigns, such as the one this week that calls for a reform of European fishing quotas. "People can get mobilised by the most unfashionable things," Patel says, recalling a 2009 campaign for energy-efficient refrigerators.

On many campaigns, Avaaz's core team takes guidance from people they call their "kitchen cabinets", or small groups of specialists. But frequently, the ideas for these campaigns come from the members themselves. Patel presides over 52 full-time staff worldwide, some of whom spend their days sifting through thousands of members' campaign suggestions. Avaaz then polls wider groups of members to see which ideas have the most currency. "My members are my boss," claims Patel, "and I don't think they've ever made a bad call."

They also now fund the entire project. Since 2009, Avaaz has not taken donations from foundations or corporations, nor has it accepted payments of more than $5,000 (£3,100). Instead, it relies simply on the generosity of individual members, who have now raised over $20m (£12.4m). Much of this money goes towards specific campaigns. This year, $1.5m (£900,000) was raised to supply cameras to citizen journalists throughout the Arab world; as a result, much of the footage currently coming out of Syria was filmed on equipment provided by Avaaz.

Closer to home, Avaaz's Murdoch campaign may have been so far, so successful, but the team isn't letting up just yet. Avaaz is planning a US-based campaign in the next few days that will aim to get Murdoch to testify to Congress. In the UK, the team want members to push for a change in media regulation, to give the Press Complaints Commission back its teeth, and to ensure that no single party owns more than 20% of British media. But will the campaign maintain its pace? In the end, it'll be down to the appetite of the members.

"I'm still working out if I believe in the wisdom of all crowds," says Patel. "But I definitely believe in the wisdom of this one."

How Avaaz picks its battles

Campaign ideas are submitted by Avaaz's members in the first instance.

But once an idea is settled on, it still has to pass a rigorous selection procedure. First, a tester email is sent to a random selection of 10,000 members in a particular country. Any "tester" that doesn't encourage at least 10% to open it is generally discarded.

Test emails that pass this threshold then need to ensure around a 40% conversion rate. Here, they're testing the email's contents. If the email's going to fly, at least two in five of those who opened it need to go the extra mile: to click through to Avaaz's website.

A campaign with promise will encourage more than 80% of those people to sign the petition. Emails that achieve this ratio – around 6% of the original audience – will then be rolled out to Avaaz's entire membership in the relevant country.