Facebook may take back voting privilege
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is finding out just how messy democracy can be.
Three years ago it was praised for giving users a voice in major policy changes. Now the giant social network is proposing to end the practice of letting users vote. And that has stirred up a new wave of controversy.
Digital strategist Julius Harper, said he is “hugely disappointed” that Facebook wants to take away his ability to vote; he accused Facebook of bowing to pressure from Wall Street.
“Most people on Facebook don’t even know they can vote or even that a vote is going on,” he said. “What is a democracy if you don’t know where the polling place is? Or that a vote is even being held?”
Harper, 29, organized the protest in 2009 in which tens of thousands of people noisily objected to changes Facebook made to its terms of service that appeared to give Facebook permanent ownership of users’ status updates, photos and other contributions to the site.
The uproar spurred Facebook to begin letting users vote on major changes to how it handles their personal information.
Harper said Facebook set an impossibly high bar by requiring that 30 percent of Facebook users participate for a vote to count. Facebook has held two votes and neither met that threshold. Now that Facebook has more than 1 billion users, some 300 million users would have to cast ballots.
Harper said he would like to see Facebook explore alternatives. “The solution is not to get rid of the vote,” he said.
Facebook says it’s a publicly traded company that has to answer to regulators around the globe. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, wrote last week that Facebook wants a “system that leads to more meaningful feedback.”
Facebook plans to give users other ways to weigh in on policy changes such as a question-and-answer forum.
David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” said critics are not giving Facebook the credit it deserves for its experiment in democracy.
“I challenge anybody to think of any other company, especially one with a large number of customers, that invited its customers to vote on how to alter the product,” he said.
If enough Facebook users rally to keep their vote, Facebook “will have to adjust as it has had to do time and time again,” Kirkpatrick said.
That’s what happened in 2009 when, amid negative publicity over terms of service changes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the step of giving users the right to vote on future policy changes.
Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis said Facebook has no choice but to roll back initiatives conceived in its more idealistic youth, especially since so few Facebook users took part in the democratic process.