Obama Assassination Poll on Facebook Attracts US Secret Service Attention

A poll posted to Facebook has gone so far as to draw the attention of the US Secret Service. The poll, asked the question: “Should Obama be killed?” and offered users multiple choice answers (yes, no, maybe and ‘if he cuts my health care’). According to the Mashable more than 750 users voted in the poll before Facebook took notice of it. While according to Facebook it was a third-party application that enabled an individual user to create that offensive poll.

Many Twitter users also discussed about this issue. Here is a CNN video about this offensive poll where Blogger Bunch discusses with some authorities of blogging world and ‘US Secret Service’ about whether this is a threat to ‘President of United States’ or not and they pointed it out that this was really not a threat and a kid was behind all this but such cases should be monitored and secret service is obligated to track such people even at the internet who spread and follow such offensive stuff.

Facebook immediately suspended that third party application which was responsible for the poll while their developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content. The incident highlights significant challenge for Facebook which has more than 350,000 applications on its platform and the company can not possibly be expected to police everything, and most users probably wouldn’t want them to.

Here is the challenge for social networking websites where users generate the content. Obviously monitoring such a huge amount of information can be hard but we can see that social networking websites need to have more control over user generated content.

Topic: Facebook, Social Streams
Tags: facebook, obama, poll, president, social
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