Facebook’s 2012 governance vote failed because only 0.038% participated

Evidence

In 2012, Facebook held a vote. Starting in 2009, Facebook users could actually “veto” a policy, but it required 30 percent of users to participate to make it binding. The 2012 vote received just 0.038 percent participation. Facebook went ahead and amended the policy, even though a clear majority of those who did vote were against it. And it got rid of the veto policy itself. The vote was, in the eyes of the press and many users, considered a failure. But instead of considering it a failure, what if it had been treated as a clumsy first step? Hundreds of thousands of users voted on an obscure data policy, after all. What if the real failure was that Facebook was discouraged from trying again? — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 638

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking specific data point about the collapse of Facebook’s user-voting experiment worth sending to anyone interested in platform governance.
• XREF: connects to: Moderation is the essential commodity platforms actually sell to users — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 631