Facebook Polls - The Ugly Side of Public Polls

I am sure that there is some person out there that has gone into relative hiding right now as the FBI and Secret Service starts investigating
whomever put up a poll on facebook “Should Obama be Killed?”. Common
sense obviously took a holiday here, and this just opens the door to
all sorts of conversations about social networking.

Beyond the obvious point of “why did someone do something so
stupid” when everything seems to be extraordinarily politically charged
lately, who ultimately is going to be influenced by this one. The poll
creator is obviously going to be the one to take the fall for doing
something amazingly stupid, but in the longer run, how will this
influence how Facebook starts to address created polls. Well beyond
taking them down, because this is obviously not the first time an
online poll has asked if someone should be killed.

This simple Google search
pretty much shows what I want it to show, that polls asking if someone
should be killed, tortured, or otherwise maimed is a fairly common
occurrence online. We have seen more cyber bullying and more really bad
internet enabled behaviors on social networks that one has to question
the “lowest common denominator” of how we share information with each
other. While I am not saying that Free Speech should be suspended, but
I am saying is that there are obviously stupid things to say online
that will haunt the writer most likely for as long as search engine
caches exist. We have even seen the blogosphere erupt when people get
taken to task, and we have seen horrific elements of stupidity that
have cost someone their life.

You have to stop and think, what was going through the person’s
head, is it real? Was it meant as a joke? Is this something that
someone did because they thought it would be funny or were they
serious? With all the polarization across party lines (democrat and
republican) social networking is going to highlight those polarized
ideas. Social networking overall is a good thing, but much like the
explosion of porn on the internet, social networking makes it far too
easy to be a jerk in public and in some ways (as the secret service
investigates) complicates a person’s life. Much beyond the ideal that
we all try to act nicely to each other, we instead really show how poor
our judgment is when we do stupid things online. Sites like Texts From Last Night and People of Wal-Mart show us at our worst. And while we laugh about it now, these are the kinds of things we post online that alter our lives.

And good luck getting them taken off the internet, because the
internet is one big global cache of the good, the bad, and the ugly
that we are as a global society. What we do now online will haunt us
forever, what we say, what we do, the pictures we post, and the polls
we make. It will be interesting to see if the person was just being an
idiot thinking this would be funny, or if this would be a much bigger
issue along the way.