[Update 11/19/2018:] Yagyu, the original creator of the petition, received a response from Change.org regarding the irregular activity of losing thousands of signatures over the course of a couple of days. Change messaged Yagyu, attempting to explain the discrepancy by stating….

“There might be times where a user submits a signature without a valid email address, so our platform will remove it. Other times, people will decide to remove their support from a petition by any number of reasons, so they will withdraw their signature.”

Some users have also reported that their signatures were removed and that they had to re-sign, which isn’t specifically addressed by Change.

[Original article:] A petition put together by a Marvelous Entertainment partner to highlight how the community doesn’t want Sony’s new censorship policy to ruin anymore games, has been losing signatures by the thousands.

On October 16th, 2018, the Marvelous partner, who is a Japanese developer working on their own game, started the petition over on Change.org.

Over the course of two months the petition gained more than 11,000 signatures, as evident with the image below.

However, over the last week the petition has been losing signatures at a rapid clip.

The petition, as of November 18th, 2018, is down to 8,288 signatures.

The petition losing thousands of signatures caught the attention of those following it, especially after the petition initially gained more than 10,000 signatures just before November 15th, 2018, as chronicled over on Kotaku in Action.

The petition was put together after news broke that various games would have to undergo serious censorship changes in order to accommodate their gameplay to Sony’s new Western-oriented content policy, which includes the prohibition of Intimacy Modes in any future Senran Kagura games, and removing panty shots and fondling from visual novels.

Some gamers believe that there’s some sort of foul play at hand with messing with the signature count, while others think that Sony may be attempting to intervene after Yagyu reached out to them about the petition milestone. A few think that maybe Change.org has a glitch in the system. There’s also speculation that bots were signing the petition and Change.org is removing them as signers.

I attempted to reach out to Change.org to inquire about what’s been happening with the petition and why it’s suddenly losing thousands of signatures every couple of days. If they choose to respond the article will be updated with their response.

(Thanks for the news tip Joseph)