it's basically public relations, of a sort. the non-plutocratic non-malicious type.
IMO, physical protests especially large ones don't help us. the NGO/spooks are running amok cultivating their little farms of mind control drones to manipulate the outcomes of things. like smearing the legitimate concern the protest is about.
but i did rather like the petition thing. there hasn't been enough of that, the manipulators in their PR departments cooking up narratives to twist people's minds up and confuse them, a simple, reasonably verifiable several million signers is very good PR that the government can't buy for their nefarious purposes and can't easily compromise, unlike sending in agent provocateurs into a protest to start setting fires and throwing molotovs.
actually, come to think of it, verifiable petitions and polls on nostr could become a very important thing. #jumble now has polls.
eliminating the shadow of doubt around whether voters or petitioners are just sock puppets or not can be removed via analytics tools and protocols.
letting other people know that they are not alone in believing something is a very powerful tool for helping break the PR manipulation fog of war.