Low Turnout for Facebook Vote

Facebook users were up in arms a few months back when Facebook sneakily changed its Terms of Use (TOS) to allow for ownership of all uploaded content, even from members who had closed their accounts. In response, Facebook opened up the rewritten TOS to a vote. Disappointingly, not many people showed up to to the virtual polls. Just over 650,000 people voted, with 74 percent choosing the new terms over the old ones. This is just 3% of Facebook's 200-million plus community. Facebook seemed disappointed as well and said so on its blog:

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. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes.

This low turnout just doesn't make sense given the initial outrage Facebook experienced. The debate was quite public and forced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to almost immediately retract the TOS. So why the low voter turnout? Is it possible that these 650,000 voters were responsible for all the ruckus? Or did people simply lose interest once Facebook did the right thing and opened the decision up to the voters?

I'm not quite sure of the answer but I think this phenomenon of lack of youth engagement is an interesting one. Obama mobilized a nation and was able to lure swarms of young people out from their Playstation, Mountain Dew-fueled dens and into the voting booths. But now that they've cast their vote, what's next? This engagement level seems to have gone from 100 to zero overnight.

So if Facebook's initial wrongdoing was able to mobilize this youthful community, why weren't they able to carry this energy over into the voting process? That's the question Facebook execs are now being faced with (pun intended) and one they even attempted to address on their blog:

We made significant efforts to make voting easy and to give everyone the opportunity to vote — including by translating the documents and voting application into several of the most popular languages on the site, showing a message about the vote on users' home pages, and running advertisements and videos across Facebook promoting the vote.