Facebook Voting Has Ended; New Terms Being Considered Despite Small Turnout
When voting ended yesterday on the Facebook terms of service, around 600,000 people had voted, and about 70% of those votes were cast for the new documents drafted over the past couple of months. Although the voting total was nowhere near the 30% of active Facebook users that Facebook said would be required, the site is still considering validating the vote and implementing the new terms after the audit is complete.
We know that many people have been worried that Facebook was pretending at this whole process, and that by setting the minimum vote threshold so high they were trying to sabotage it while maintaining the appearance of cooperation. We were skeptical, too. But if Facebook goes ahead and implements the new documents despite the small turnout, we think most critics will have to admit that Facebook is actually trying to listen to its users.
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]
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Comments:
Buzz Outloud was discussing about the very low key nature of this vote. I vaguely remember reading about it in a RSS feed, but didn't give it much thought until 2 days ago when the Consumerist brought it up. I think facebook is trying to save face(haha) and appear to care about what users think.
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.
@Michael Belisle: Yeah! No kidding! Plus once I did add it, it errored out and I couldn't vote anyway. Oh well, I don't really give a crap in the first place. If they want ownership of the pictures of my cat, they can have them.
I didn't know about it until I read about it here...clearly I'm not much of a Facebook-er.
@lifestar: Look, Facebook is popular, but do you really think a vote on a website's Terms of Service is going to appear on CBS, ABC and NBC?
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.
While I'm sure I'm considered an "active user" I really don't care about their terms of service. I'm glad some people do, but whatever, facebook is stupid anyway, that 600,000 number is probably about how many people are actually active on their site, the other few million login maybe once every other day...if that.
While they may have 200 million active users, how many of those have actually logged on to their accounts in the past week, month, year? Many probably signed up and only seldom logon. I did not receive any type of e-mail notification about the voting and only knew about it because of the articles I read here on Consumerist. When I next logged on to Facebook, there was a blurb at the top of the screen about the vote, but it wasn't set up as a notification, alert or via any other method that would really make an attempt at garnering user attention.
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.
I don't think the promotion on Facebook itself was all that great. I check Facebook several times each day and I didn't notice the banner on the vote until after I read about it on Consumerist.
If people didn't vote, it's obvious that they don't really care, so I think the new terms should be implemented because the people who DO care voted for them. If you didn't care enough to vote, you shouldn't care about whatever the outcome is. We don't throw away election results because of low turnout.
@Michael Belisle: It made you add an application? Strange... all I had to do was log in and click a link facebook provided. I voted, logged out, done. No applications for me.
how many of facebook's 200 million users log in more than once a week? or even have active accounts at all? i have several friends who have started new accounts for various reasons. one got locked out of his university linked account, another create one just to play scrabulous. i'm sure facebook wants to use the highest number possible, but requiring a percentage of active users would have been more honest here.
@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!
I tried to vote. I wasn't able to because I'm too new of a user, having only gotten an account a month ago.
@satindevil: You didn't at all have to add the application to actually vote (there was a tab or link on the voting page that let you do it). You did have to install the application to enable "vote tracking," which I'm guessing let you monitor the voting results as time went on.
@lifestar: The point is that users apparently don't care...so there's no reason for Facebook to "save face."
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.
@supercereal: Oh, I see. I didn't bother installing that since they posted that information on the facebook voting page.
Such is the problem with the silly vote. I'm a customer. I don't have time to dictate your corporate policy (even though I did vote), and shouldn't be expected to. They know what people want, and they're just dragging their feet. It's ridiculous.
@satindevil: I could be wrong since I didn't investigate in-depth, but I believe I clicked the Consumerist link and it asked me if I wanted to authorize blah blah to access my information.
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.
@TWinter: I'll second that. I'd sort of noticed the banner, but didn't realize it was about the new terms. I do recall it was pretty wordy, and when I'm on FB it's all about short attention span.
A better banner would have simply said "VOTE ON THE NEW TERMS OF SERVICE BY CLICKING HERE".
@Michael Belisle: Oh, ok. I voted directly through facebook, not by clicking the Consumerist link. Privacy settings may have something to do with it too.
Let's be honest here: it was a hell of a lot of text. I sat here reading it for 15 minutes to make an informed decision, because it's a really slow week at work and I had nothing better to do.
But if I were 14?
People "don't care" but I'm willing to bet those same people are the same asshats who join all those "F&C% THE NEW FACEBOOK" groups.
Good for facebook [having that "election']. This way, those who didn't vote have no reason to complain.
@Michael Belisle: Yeah, when it was first announced and linked here it seemed to require adding an app to vote, so I passed.
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.
This statement "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" is misleading. This 1% was calculated based on the TOTAL users of Facebook (200 million) rather than the ACTIVE users number (which is unknown). I'm sure the percentage would be higher if the actual number of active users was utilized.
I would have voted. If I had known about it. But Facebook clutters my newsfeed up with so much junk that I didn't hear about it until today, after voting had ended.
I think the real problem was that it was just sooo damn long and boring to read through all of it. If they had made a couple of bullet points with the main differences between each of them, they would have increased turnout dramatically. As it stood, you had to spend at least an hour to even get through and understand both documents.
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.
@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.
@salvatorecondegni: Precisely - they should just honor the results of the vote. Requiring a certain number of people to vote just seems redundant.
How do they count active users? I log about once or a month. The only reason I knew about the vote was this site.
Isn't this more suggestive that Facebook lies about their total membership numbers? (Like every other website, ever?)
I think they should've narrowed their requirements more than "everyone who's logged in recently." I think it would be better if it limited voting to people who login daily every/almost every day for the last X months. I have friends who only login once a month or something yet they'd count in the numbers they were using.
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.
They have tens of millions of e-mail addresses of Facebook users, and didn't bother to send an e-mail notifying people of a very important vote.
"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.
@TWinter: Same. I'm on FB often, and didn't really know about it until the Consumerist pointed it out.
isnt the point of a vote, to tally and use it?
saying there must be x % to "consider" it's validity is lame.
As a person who posts photos onto Facebook it was a concern to me...so yes, I voted. It was heavy reading, but there was a "translated" version that made it easier.
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.
What really scares me is how many people blindly chose "Yes" in the vote, going with the phrasing of how "Facebook went to the community for advice" and other such bull. If you really do read through it, the old terms from last year gives Facebook less control of your intellectual property, as opposed to this "collaboration." Notice that Facebook doesn't have to specify which parts they took from the community, if any.
I'm a facebook user and I seriously didn't even know about this. I'm sure they promoted it somewhere within all those useless/spam notifications that I try to weed through at every login.
My biggest issue with this whole thing was that it wasn't well publicized. I am on facebook almost everyday. Yet there was no warning, and no notice that this was happening. I did finally receive an invitation to vote on the last day, after voting the day before.
I would leave Facebook if it didn't have a monopoly and my social life
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 might have voted if they didn't make me add an application to do it.