The petition (along with the Pirate Software drama) has recently been covered by quite a few very popular content creators like MoistCritikal, Asmongold and Pewdiepie. I think that made a lot of difference, as their videos on the topic have millions of views.
I just hope it’s natural traffic and not a ton of bots. The recent acceleration in signatures has been great to see, but also a bit… suspicious. In any case we should keep collecting as many signatures as possible after the million, as there will undoubtedly be fake/invalid signatures that will be filtered out at the end.
The thing is, it would be far from the first time for fans of certain Internet personalities to manipulate petitions or polls on a massive scale. Yes, there has been a lot of genuine new support for the campaign, but I’m not sure I trust that there wasn’t quite a bit of botting as well, especially with how many new signatures there were even during late night and early morning hours. It’s unfortunately also quite trivial for some countries (like Germany) to enter fake signatures. Even without coordinated botting, I’m sure there were for example some Americans who saw how easy it was to enter a random name and did just that.
I’m really happy about the support the campaign received but I think that, realistically, we’re not over the finish line yet and have to keep campaigning for more signatures over the next few weeks.
Edit: Seems Ross agrees