March 1, 2009

Facebook's Democracy

Just as Brian Solis said that social media is about people, Facebook has tried to reach out to the social media community after the story broke of how their terms of service indicated that Facebook owned users’ content. After a protest in the social media community, Facebook wants people to vote on how policy documents will be phrased. In a statement from Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said, “As people share more information on services like Facebook, a new relationship is created between Internet companies and the people they serve.”

In order to give users more input on the site, Facebook’s method will be online voting and “virtual ‘Town Halls’”. With these methods, they can take users’ comments and review them in order to see how they should reword their policies. For future policies, Facebook will install a user council.

As a Facebook user, I think Facebook is trying their best to build a relationship with their users and try to correct the misunderstanding of the past policy mishap. Facebook is representing how the social media community operates, and that is, above all, that social media is about people. Users are what helped the site grow, and it’s important that it’s never forgotten. I believe Facebook is now giving the opportunity for people to be happy with how Facebook will be operated, and now users just need to take advantage of that opportunity.

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