Why it’s a good thing that Facebook has given up on democracy

[Commentary] Is the removal of the right to vote a crushing blow for online democracy? Hardly, because there isn’t any democratic right inherent in using Facebook, and there never has been — and you could argue that encouraging people to believe they have democratic rights when they actually don’t is the kind of approach that totalitarian states use, and is probably more dangerous in the long term than admitting that your vote doesn’t matter.

If it makes you as a Facebook user feel any better, it’s not just your vote that doesn’t count: as a result of the way that co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg controls the board of directors of the company through voting proxies and a number of other perfectly legal methods, the votes of the majority of Facebook shareholders don’t really count either. The social network has what’s called a dual-voting share structure — meaning some shares have 10 times as many votes attached to them as the regular class — and Zuckerberg controls a majority of the super-voting shares (other tech companies such as Google also use this structure). And since he also controls the board, his word is effectively law.