Facebook To Implement New Governing Documents

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Facebook To Implement New Governing Documents [online.wsj.com]

Facebook Inc. said it would move to implement two new governing documents after preliminary results showed that 74.4% of Facebook users who participated in a vote on the new documents supported them.

The social-networking site said it would adopt the new terms of service even though too few users voted to reach the threshold -- 30% of users – that it set for the new terms to go into effect. The company said that "more than 600,000" of its 200 million users voted.

"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," said Facebook's general counsel, Ted Ullyot, in a blog post late Thursday night.

Earlier stories
Facebook's new "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities" [webmasterworld.com]

Facebook Opens Voting on Site Governance [webmasterworld.com]

Facebook Gets Criticism For Latest Changes [webmasterworld.com]

[Slinger]

Is there such a thing as a narcissistic company?

[edited by: Slinger at 5:46 pm (utc) on April 24, 2009]

[esllou]

so they initially required 60m votes and they got 600k? Some 1% of the necessary threshold actually voted. Is this normal Facebook or Facebook Zimbabwe?

[httpwebwitch]

hey folks, considering that facebook has a population 6 times greater than Canada, it's revolutionary that they decided to implement any sort of DEMOCRACY. Who has ever heard of an online community holding a vote over policies? Most internet properties are ruled by a pack of capitalists and their lawyers. This should be considered a landmark event on the triple-double-u.

All things considered, 600K is an awesome turnout... considering that it wasn't an election whose issues people understood or were that emotionally concerned about, and it wasn't very well publicized. I've often mused that our federal elections would be more effective if less people voted... but that's another topic ;)

[esllou]

actually I agree with that, just that if they themselves set thresholds, at least stick to them.

oh, and I was having a bad day yesterday. :)

[2clean]

Thanks for my funny moment from the Facebook democracy, and the skilled drafters of non-loaded questions. Impartial and balanced.

It would have been better to write...

Which documents would you like approve...

New Documents (these are the ones we'd really like you to vote on because it has the support of the whole community and will allow us to commerically market your data in ways that we were never previously allowed to do.).

Existing documents (boo, no no, ooo you wicked documents, we were so naive to have written these to begin with..FacebookAutoslap....naughty naughty).

Funny!

[dudibob]

Really doesn't surprise me that less than 1% voted for anything, nobody cares about stuff like that on Facebook, they just want to chat to their friends not read two T&C policies and decide which one is better for them.

But congrats to Facebook for actually putting a vote out there

[Hugene]

Read the documents, both are a joke, old one was draconian, new one is less-so, but still, I wouldn't upload any art work, photo, code or any other sort of copyrighted/personal work, because basically it becomes theirs. Way to go thieves. It's like Hotmail or Gmail owning any of your copyrighted work that you have send through their services.

[2clean]

"It's like Hotmail or Gmail owning any of your copyrighted work that you have send through their services. "

Where are the TOS for that one?