A Facebook poll — apparently advocating assassination — has cropped up, with the question, “Should Obama be killed?”
Pam Spaulding points out the poll on her blog. The answer choices are Yes, No, If he cuts my health care, and Maybe.
These polls are part of an application run by an outside party, not Facebook itself.
An ancillary poll has also popped up: “Should the person who created the ‘Should Obama be Killed Poll’ be arrested?”
Late update: The application that hosted these polls has apparently been disabled. The links above now lead to an error message: “The application ‘Polls’ is temporarily unavailable due to an issue with its third-party developer. We are investigating the situation and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Late late update: The Secret Service is investigating the incident and asked Facebook to remove the poll, Greg Sargent reports.
“We are taking the appropriate investigative steps,” said a Secret Service spokesman. “We are aware of it.”
Late late late update: As far as we can tell, a blog called The Political Carnival first flagged the poll Sunday night and called the Secret Service.
Another update: Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt tells TPM: “The application that enabled a user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning and was disabled. We’re following up [with] the developer to ensure the offending content has been removed and that they have better procedures in place going forward to monitor their user-generated content.”
Schnitt also tells us that it was not the Secret Service who brought the poll to Facebook’s attention, but the social networking site did report it to them.
And another update: Schnitt clarifies that the Secret Service asked Facebook today to take down the poll, but it had already been removed.
