However, that's all beside the point. The first article I stumbled on the site was "Facebook Poll Asks "Should the President Be Killed?" and Nutbars Come Out of the Woodwork." With a title that seemed so strange, I shrugged it off thinking it was simply a joke or some sort of attention grabber. Still pretty intrigued, I decided to look for more information and surprisingly, I found articles and video clips already.
On one of the many third-party applications on Facebook, a user created a poll which asked "Should Obama be killed?" Answers included "Yes," "No," "Maybe," and "If he cuts my healthcare." Overall, there were 730 users who responded to the outrageous poll, though the responses were unavailable. Once more people were aware of the poll's existence, including the Secret Service, Facebook moved to remove the poll. Facebook stated that they were unaware of the poll until early Monday (September 29), and have no record of which user created it (although they assume the third-party who created the application will have a record). Also, after the poll's removal, the Secret Service began its investigation of who was behind it and what was his or her intent in creating it.
None of the articles around seem to be full of detail, although this does simulate how quickly news can be distributed over the web through blogs, newspaper websites and social networks. A quick browse on YouTube brings up a few videos, on Facebook, there is already a poll in retaliation to the one against Obama, you can find numerous tweets about the subject from random users made on Twitter, and many blogs have already written up posts about it.. Most news articles haven't even been posted for half a day. Despite being exposed to this sort of wildfire-like spread of knowledge almost daily, I am constantly astounded by it.
SiliconANGLE (blog with the post mentioned about the poll first): www.siliconangle.net
News article from LA Times: www.latimes.com/ --
No comments:
Post a Comment