So few people voted on proposed changes to Facebook's privacy and user rights policies that even though most of the votes were against the changes the company will be adopting the revised policies after all.
Only 342,632 people participated in the vote, which ran for a week and ended this morning, according to a blog post announcing the official results on the Facebook Site Governance page. That's less than 1 percent -- .038 percent to be exact -- of the total 900 million active monthly Facebook users. The results would be binding only if 30 percent of all users, or 270 million, had voted.
The vote was triggered because a critical mass of people had commented on the proposed policies -- seven times the amount needed, in fact. Opposition to the privacy policy revisions was mounted by an Austrian law student who waged a campaign via the "Europe versus Facebook" site to get people to post comments urging a vote. While there were enough people to prompt a vote, not enough people turned out to officially weigh in.
Which raises the question of how many of the 900 million users actually knew there was even a vote. The only way people would have known from logging in is if they had liked the Site Governance page and therefore seen updates from that page; if one of their friends voted and clicked a box to send an update to their profile's news feed; or if they happened to notice a promo for the vote that was mixed in with the ads on the right side of the page. I never saw a promo, but that's because I ignore the small ads and other items on the far right. I suspect most people do.
Four days into the vote the Europe versus Facebook site issued a statement (PDF) calling the vote a "farce" and accusing Facebook of essentially hiding the polling station.