The real question then is, should they? Less than a third of 1% of active users bothered to participate in this recent vote, and it was publicized on Facebook and online through various websites and blogs. (There's a Facebook Governance Page you should become a fan of if you want to make sure you'll always be alerted to new votes or issues.) Facebook says that if they go ahead and implement the new terms, they may drop that minimum requirement for any future votes—but we sort of think if such a small group cares what Facebook does (despite the outcry in February) then maybe they should just seek input from Site Governance fans, and leave the decision making to an internal committee.
The more than 600,000 users who voted constitute a significant number of people, but at the same time that's a small number compared to our user base of more than 200 million. We made significant efforts to make voting easy and to give everyone the opportunity to vote — including by translating the documents and voting application into several of the most popular languages on the site, showing a message about the vote on users' home pages, and running advertisements and videos across Facebook promoting the vote.
We'd hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we're going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.
Anyway, hooray for clearer terms and firmly established ownership and license issues. No matter what Facebook decides to do next, we think this has been an interesting look at how websites and users can work with each other to protect everyone's interests.
"Results of the Inaugural Facebook Site Governance Vote" [Facebook]
]]>I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people who originally objected to the new T&S didn't vote because the "minimum threshold" part wasn't publicized. If you're certain 90% of people are going to vote a certain way, is *your* vote really that important?
(Yeah, it's lazy, but that's life. And yeah, I'll admit to thinking along these lines before I read about the 30% minimum here on Consumerist. I voted, and made my husband do it too.)
]]>I would leave Facebook if it didn't have a monopoly and my social life
]]>Now.....if you are interested in getting your teeth into a different aspect of Facebook - how about the lack of customer service. Facebook has been disabling accounts all over for supposed spamming - by people who belong to photo groups on FB and so type the word VOTE continuously as required.
April 14th I lost my account for doing this...20 emails later, to various addresses supposedly there to help (including the one they provided) and not ONE response...and still the account is disabled as of today.
Lost friends, lost photos, lost links, lost that social network they are so proud of and they can't even be bothered to reply.
isnt the point of a vote, to tally and use it?
saying there must be x % to "consider" it's validity is lame.
]]>"and it was publicized on Facebook and online through various websites and blogs"
I saw it on Facebook in a highlighted bar at the top of the page about a day before the voting ended. Also, you didn't mention what "websites and blogs" where it was publicized - besides Consumerist, anyway.
]]>Well,I'm not sure how I would vote,but I decided to deactivate my account when one of my neighbors tried to friend me. This would not be a good thing to say the least. Facebook just got to be too much like being back in highschool for me! There were several other things like nearly being addicted to it that led me to "close" my account.
]]>@valueofaloonie: It (the notice) didn't even show up on my facebook page until the last day of voting tbh. I saw it on here the day before.
And truth be told, when consumerist put up their first article, only 300k votes were up there. If it closed with 600k, that means 300k people voted in the final 2 days.
]]>This is what happens in Congress, they make these horribly long and boring bills that no one can possibly read through and understand. They just bore you to death so they can put stuff in there no one will pay attention to and still call it democracy.
]]>However, when the reminder post was done here I decided it might be worth adding it if I had to and then just removing it afterwards, it didn't pop up the thing about adding an application and let me vote. This was on the last day of the vote though, so I don't know if they were maybe hoping to have more people willing to vote or something.
]]>Good for facebook [having that "election']. This way, those who didn't vote have no reason to complain.
]]>But if I were 14?
]]>A better banner would have simply said "VOTE ON THE NEW TERMS OF SERVICE BY CLICKING HERE".
]]>It could depend on your privacy settings, since I've completely opted out of the Facebook API. I don't even use the iPhone App anymore because it logging in with it opts you into the API.
]]>Plus, a website changing it's terms of service is not newsworthy (on the national news stations, anyway), as JMB pointed out. It was on Consumerist, CNet's news.com, and Digg.
Believe it or not, the general Facebook population doesn't care nearly as much as Consumerist commenters do.
]]>@satindevil: same here. i clicked the link consumerist provided and it opened onto the poll because i'd already been logged in. i have no apps other than catbook so unless they are using catbook to run it, it took no apps for me!
]]>If Facebook does indeed take the user feedback despite the low voter turnout, then I may be swayed to believe they weren't intentionally making it unlikely for folks to vote. Otherwise, I'm not so sure.
]]>Maybe the other sites you mentioned, but I'd be willing to be that a lot of Facebook users wouldn't see it on those sites either.
In the end, I think the low turnout was because most people just didn't care.
]]>If they really did care, they should have made sure news outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC, Consumerist, CNet, Digg, etc. were gonna take the news and get it out to the public.
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