The Facebook Blog

Today, we take the next step in opening our site governance to everyone who uses Facebook with our first user vote. Through an application developed by Wildfire Promotion Builder, you can now vote on which documents you want to serve as the foundation for governing the Facebook site.

You will have two options on the ballot, as shown below: 1) the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which incorporate feedback from users and experts received during the 30-day comment period, or 2) the current Terms of Use, which were developed by Facebook and did not go through an outside comment period.




You can vote until 11:59 a.m. PDT on April 23, at which point the results will be reviewed by an independent auditor to ensure their accuracy. To vote, go here.

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

If these new documents are approved, all future changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will go through the same process of notice and comment, and may be put to a vote if enough people comment. Even if these new proposed documents are defeated, we will still find ways to involve you in the governance process; however, this involvement will need to be explicitly stated in a future version of the Terms of Use.

If you want to receive updates about Facebook's site governance, you can connect with the newly created Facebook Site Governance Page. We have transitioned our previous groups for the Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to this Page. It includes the full text of all of our documents and responses to people's comments on them, translated into several languages. We plan to use this Page to notify people about future proposed changes and announce additional votes as they're required.

We encourage you to join us in the governance of Facebook and vote by 11:59 a.m. PDT on April 23.