US Secret Service Questions Facebook About Obama Assassination Poll

User generated content is at the heart of yet another controversy, this time a rather tame one that got blown out of proportion, as it usually happens. The fact that the content happened to be on the increasingly popular Facebook only fueled the attention of the media which in turn caught the eye of the US Secret Service. So what could be so nefarious as to draw the attention of the government agency? Why, a Facebook poll wondering “Should Obama be killed?” of course.

The offending poll has been removed way before it caused any real harm but how the story of events unfolded is a great example of how the online landscape is changing and is highly interconnected as it involves the real-time web, social networks, user generated content and blogging all of the ingredients of the modern web environment.

A Facebook user created a poll with a Facebook app asking “Should Obama be killed?” with the four possible answers being: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care. While the subject itself is mildly controversial, especially in the hypersensitive US, there's not much harm that could have come of it and if things took their normal path a few hundreds of users may have seen the poll and that's about it.

But that's not what happened, as political blogger GottaLaff wrote a post about it which got some attention from the other political blogs. This led to the mainstream media following up on the story, which is where the Secret Service got the tip. By the time the Secret Service contacted Facebook about the poll the social network had actually removed it thanks to all of the negative attention it got.

The story raises the question again of who exactly is responsible for user-generated content. Obviously the original creator of the poll takes the bulk of the blame, but what about Facebook or the original developer for that matter? The poll app's creator Jesse Farmer had actually implemented an alert system that would notify him of possible offensive content but by the time it was triggered and he was aware of it the story had made its rounds through the news.

Facebook could also share part of the blame, though the social network did move rather quickly removing the app and is now asking Farmer to implement better prevention methods. But with an app that has close to 3.5 million monthly active users it's impossible to review all of the polls by hand and an automated system is bound to let some offensive content slip through. At the end of the day the problem here is that the poll got a lot of media attention before becoming even slightly popular on itself and in fact has been seen by a lot more users after it was mentioned in the news, showing that it’s getting increasingly harder to keep an eye on offensive user-generated content.