Facebook users now lose right to vote over future policy amendments

Facebook Site Governance Vote has now ended and with this vote period having finished, Facebook users have now lost the right to vote for future policy amendments as one of the policy that was put on vote was the voting system itself.

In order to continue voting system, Facebook needed at least 30% of its user base voting NO to new policy, however only 0.067% users actually voted NO, the actual numbers come around "589,141".

While one can argue this might be a comparative high percentage of Facebook's active users, but Facebook wanted at least 30% votes amongst its entire user base and not just from its active user base.

Almost 80,000 people agreed with the new policy to be implemented and the existing voting system may be put to an end.

This shows Facebook users are really not bothered for having the right to vote to future policy changes and probably just in lookout for a social network to interact rather than be a part of its governance policies and future amendments to its policies.


Facebook required that 30 percent of users vote (300 million) for any of the votes to be binding; with under a million voting, that clearly didn’t occur.

The new SRR (Statement of Rights and Responsibilities) policies won't require Facebook user's votes for being implemented, however one can even argue, why was the question phrased "Shall we go ahead with the new Policy" and Facebook then asking for at least 30% votes against the new policy. What if the question raised by Facebook was "Shall we keep the existing policy" and then Facebook would have needed at least 30% votes in NO in order to change to the new policy.

Well, this is not definitely how the system works, and legal requirements function as companies are asked to put forward their proposals and await whether or not significant amount of customers / users (30% in this case) have issues with the new proposal, but it was simply a creative argument.

“The Facebook Site Governance vote is now closed. Thank you for your participation. We will be announcing the results and the next steps regarding the governance process shortly, so check back soon,” Facebook wrote on its Governance page.