The Blogger Who Broke the ‘Should Obama Be Killed’ Facebook Poll Story

Until recently there was a lovely poll on Facebook asking: “Should Obama Be Killed?”

The answers offered as options were 1) Yes 2) No 3) Maybe 4) If he cuts my health care. More than 725 people voted before Facebook removed the poll, according to The Plum Line. The Secret Service has launched an investigation.

I can’t find any information about how long the poll was up, but it appears the person who first wrote about it and then <a href="http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2009/09/secret-service-just-called-to-thank-me.html and then alerted the Secret Service was a blogger named GottaLaff, who co-runs a blog called The Political Carnival.

Here’s GottaLaff’s screen-grab of the poll, which she posted Sunday night:

In her blog she writes:

Just now, I got a phone call from the Secret Service. Yes, that Secret Service. It was from a very sweet woman with a very sweet voice. She called to thank me for my screen grab of the poll, and said without it, they wouldn’t have been able to address the matter.

Good work, Agent GottaLaff.

This is a great example of how the Internet and social media enable acts of citizen journalism. Plus the story has everything: a vigilant blogger, a social networking site being used for indefensible and potentially criminal reasons, a network of aggregators to ping the drama around cyberspace, and a “very sweet woman with a very sweet voice.”

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