It’s been approximately 2 months since my last post – I guess diving head first into law school does that sort of thing to you – but I felt compelled to leave a brief commentary about the recent Facebook terms of use vote.
As someone who read the terms and the information concerning the user vote, I literally laughed when I saw Facebook’s commitment to democracy. The vote would be binding upon the casting of votes of a mere 30% of its user base, so long as votes were cast in the following 30 days.
Seems reasonable, until you remember that Facebook claims to have 900,000,000+ users (30% of which is between 270 million and 300 million people, nearly the total US population)
Compare that to US Presidential elections, for which there are now essentially four years of campaigning and we consider it good when a little over 100 million turn out.
It is absurd to view this as a genuine attempt at giving users a voice. Now the all-benevolent Facebook is taking step two in the dictator playbook by giving users one of the big things they have clamored for – privacy setting changes.
You have to admit that Facebook plays its hand well. Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Suharto were all democratically elected…
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