The reason for the vote is that in the new user agreement Facebook wants to stop offering users the opportunity to vote on future changes to the user agreements. Instead, Facebook wants to use other methods to communicate with users.
One of the biggest misconceptions, according to Facebook, is that users believe that their content uploaded to the service will no longer be owned by them, but by Facebook.
– There have been comments circulating suggesting that we will take over ownership of the users’ uploaded material. That is not true, and it never has been. Everyone who uses Facebook owns their own material, just as it says in our user agreement, Facebook explains in a post.
For the vote to be valid, however, it is required that at least 30 percent of the users cast their vote. This corresponds to approximately 300 million users. If the number of votes corresponds to less than 30 percent of the users, the voting will be treated as “advisory”.
At the time of writing, 31,118 users have voted for the current user agreement while 3,326 have voted for Facebook’s new proposal. The vote can be found here, and an explanation of the new user agreement can be found here.