Vote On Facebook! (It Could Be Your Last Chance)

Facebook's decision to eliminate member voting on policy changes is coming down to what could be the last member vote ever on the world's largest social network. The good news is that it could still be reversed. The bad news? The only thing that can stop disenfranchisement is if the number of votes cast are equal to nearly the entire population of the United States.

Facebook's pesky democracy problem? Members can vote to reverse a policy change if a) 7,000 people comment on it, and b) one-third of the total membership casts a ballot in an election Facebook is required to schedule.

Facebook is addressing a legitimate problem with the voting protocol — the infinitesimal percentage of its one billion members that can make a vote happen. But rather than fix that, Facebook has decided to scrap the entire member-empowering initiative. By ending it entirely it has set off a nuclear bomb when a grenade would have done.

Talk about voter suppression.

Facebook announced the proposed change to end its experiment with democracy just before the Thanksgiving holiday. But the traditional time to bury bad news — right before the weekend, extra points for doing so right before a holiday weekend — didn't stop more than 17,000 members from commenting on the proposed change.

That's 10,000 more than is required to trigger what would only be the third such vote in the four years Facebook has allowed for them. The previous two failed and, with more than one billion members, this one is almost certainly destined to fall short as well.

The reason is that Facebook members can only be heard when a minimum of 30% of them vote. A simple majority of whomever decides to vote doesn't count. If every single US member in the — all 168 million of them — voted "No", it would make absolutely no difference. For Facebook to even count the votes, just a tad fewer people than the entire US population of 315 million would have to participate. That would require votes from every member in Facebook's next two biggest countries — Brazil (61.8 million) and India (60.6 million). And they'd still need a little help from Egypt (11.8 million).

C'mon Egypt! You remember how Facebook helped out with democracy during the Arab Spring, right? You're about to lose it on Facebook. Oh, the irony …

I took a very dim view of the proposed Facebook changes in my Reuters MediaFile column last week. But the most peculiar aspect of all this is that it all seems so unnecessary. The illusion of participatory democracy could easily be maintained simply by raising the comment threshold that triggers a vote. Require 50,000 comments. Or 100,000. Or, to make it future-proof, some percentage of the total membership, just as the plurality floor is set.

Facebook itself asserted that the trigger was the problem: “We found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality,” Elliot Schrage, vice president, communications, public policy and marketing said in a blog post.

Fair enough. But since the content of the comments was irrelevant to the process — all 7,000 comments could be glowingly approving — Facebook's real gripe is quantity, not quality.

It seems clear that the purpose of this change isn't to prevent policy from being changed — it has never happened and probably never would given the steep requirements — but to silence dissent on the pages of Facebook itself. Even if votes never changed a thing, it isn't pretty to have members clamoring for change in a sanctioned process on the network.

Of the 17,000 or so comments on this policy, 95% are said to be negative. Whether that distaste will convert into sufficient votes in the balloting process Facebook will schedule (at its own discretion) is another matter entirely.

But wouldn't it be something if this third vote turned out not to be the last because of heavy turnout? Don't Facebook members owe it to themselves to preserve the right to vote, even if they think everything Facebook does or will ever do is just fine?

(Photo: By Krzysztof Urbanowicz/Flickr)