Fox Nation: Stupid or lying?

Written by Ben Dimiero

Published

Fox Nation has a thought-provoking question for their readers:

fnpoll

That is a good question. I've got a quick follow-up question of my own: Does Fox Nation not understand the difference between someone who writes a program and someone who uses it, or are they just making things up again?

Fox Nation is clearly implying that an Obama supporter authored this poll. But, as they are wont to do, they helpfully link to an article that completely undercuts that suggestion:

Jesse Farmer, of Bumbalabs in Palo Alto, Calif., has given permission for Facebook to reveal that he was the developer, but, significantly, not the author behind the poll that nauseated many Monday.

Whoops. The article goes on to point out that Farmer is an Obama supporter. However, as Farmer further explained in a diary posted on Daily Kos yesterday, he had nothing to do with authoring the poll itself and removed it as soon as it was brought to his attention:

Polls are created by other Facebook users, not me, anyone affiliated with me, or Facebook.

[...]

Thousands of polls are created daily, sometimes as many as 10,000. Each poll has as many as 2MM votes and 200k comments. Of those thousands of polls, most are gibberish and a few are offensive, libelous, or otherwise beyond the pale.

[...]

The poll was created Sunday evening and I deleted it first thing Monday morning.

Just to run through this again quickly: Jesse Farmer develops an application that allows Facebook users to create their own polls. The application becomes very popular, leading to thousands of polls created daily. Someone uses the application to create an incendiary, outrageous poll about President Obama. Fox Nation blames Jesse Farmer for posting the poll.

If Fox Nation is suggesting Farmer is at fault because he should have checked each of the several thousand polls first, I would just like to point out that Fox Nation would have had to read only the one article they link to in order to realize it disproves their headline.

I guess “Why Would An Obama Supporter Develop A Program That Someone Could Eventually Use To Post A Crazy Poll About Obama?” doesn't have quite the same ring to it.