Some mornings a quick glance at Twitter is enough to make you lose faith in the world. Take the morning of the Syria vote. Stella Creasy had just kicked a puppy into a tree … sorry, she had tweeted that she had not yet made up her mind on how to vote, and the Twittersphere had turned on her. The world had divided themselves into two camps; those who were criticising her and those that were threatening to rape and kill her.

To be perfectly clear on this from the start – I appreciate that the two camps are very different. The latter I think is completely wrong, and if I were God for the day I would wipe such odious behaviour out of existence. The former are, of course, perfectly within their rights to share their views and criticise Stella if that is how they feel. I just completely disagree with them. And, at a glance, it seemed that morning that I fundamentally disagreed with the world.

But I have been a waitress. As anyone that has worked in customer service knows, the feedback you receive is not necessarily representative of how well you are doing. If you go through the letters sent to the manager, they will be 100 per cent negative – that does not mean that everyone who ever ate in your restaurant had an awful time. It probably means that the people who had a perfectly nice meal never bothered to tell you about it.

The problem when this phenomenon happens in politics is that it often skews the real picture, and can lead people making decisions on completely false information. ‘There is a huge move for deselection!’ seems true when there are hundreds of people chanting for it outside her office – but there were thousands of people that did not turn up, and maybe that is because they think Stella is doing a great job for the constituency. No one except Jon Stewart organises a march to show that they are happy with things, so those people are presumed not to exist.

As a purely statistical point, the fact that hundreds of people are tweeting the hashtag #DontBombSyria does not prove that the thousands of constituents not on Twitter did not quietly register an alternative view. The assertion, ‘You haven’t listened to your constituents’ is often used instead of, ‘Your vote didn’t match up with my (often unsubstantiated) impression of the public mood’. You may well be right, but if you have not done an unbiased, representative survey on the issue then your certainty may be misplaced. If we were as good at judging these things as we think we are, we would not have been nearly so surprised by the reaction we got on the doorstep before the general election – or by the result the morning after.

To be honest, I would ordinarily have settled into my place with the silent majority, but Stella Creasy saved my life. When I was in the payday loan trap she was the person who supported me in speaking up, gave me back some confidence in myself – actually fixed the bad practices in the industry than had driven me to the brink. She has worked bravely and tirelessly to support victims of domestic violence and online misogyny. After all she had done for us, I thought it was a pretty poor show that no one even had the space to speak up for her.

Then I thought; nuts to this. I had spent all morning patiently accepting the other sides right to campaign for views I didn’t share – why not use my own right to campaign for something I did?

So I started a petition. Against every bit of guidance on ‘effective’ petitioning, it does not contain any demands – it simply offers people a way to register their support, rather than being appropriated by a loud group of people attempting to speak for them. So far, nearly 1,700 people have signed it. Had 1,700 people turned up that peaceful vigil in a counter protest, the story would have been very different. ‘Stella up for deselection’ would never have been a headline. And yet those people did exist, and thought what they thought, when everyone was getting themselves excited about the Walthamstow coup.

I hope giving people like myself a platform would improve the quality of debate and give a more accurate picture for people to evaluate and make decisions on. Failing that, I hoped it would at least give Stella (who, I have recently discovered, is a human being like myself) the sort of comfort I used to cling to when I was desperately trying to do my best. But ultimately I did it because, regardless of the abuse it would no doubt provoke, in spite of the fact I had nothing to gain from it personally, I thought it was right. And that is what Stella Creasy would do.

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Steve Doran is a Labour party activist. She tweets @GirlSteve