Facebook vote confirms new terms despite low turnout

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When it comes to voter apathy, online democracy isn’t much different than the offline variety, Facebook has discovered.

Facebook gave its users a week to vote on new governance documents, following uproar when the site changed its terms of service without asking its users first.

Nearly three-quarters of voters said they liked the new ‘Facebook Principles’ and ‘Statement of Rights and Responsibilities’ better than the current terms, but just 600,000 people voted.

While that may sound like a decent turnout, the site has 200 million users world wide, so just 0.3 per cent bothered to cast their vote, despite Facebook offering it in a variety of languages and advertising it across the site.

“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 Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, in a blog posting.

“We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes," he added.

Ullyot said that Facebook would lower the 30 per cent threshold on voting, which required that proportion of the site’s users to vote against something in order to force a change. Currently, it would require 60 million people to actually vote to have the result be binding.

The new terms will come into play soon, Ullyot wrote, once the vote’s results have been externally audited.

Earlier this month, researchers called the vote "democracy theatre," saying “it seems the goal is not to actually turn governance over to users, but to use the appearance of democracy and user involvement to ward off future criticism.”

Read on to find out why we haven't managed to create the People's Republic of Facebook quite yet.

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