U.S. Secret Service Investigating Facebook Poll Asking "Should Obama Be Killed?"

Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress at 6:30 AM on September 29, 2009.

On Saturday, a user on Facebook posted a poll asking, "Should Obama be killed?" The blogger GottaLaff spotted the poll yesterday and called the Secret Service, which has now launched an investigation. "We are aware of [the poll], and we will take the appropriate investigative steps," said Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesman. "We take these things seriously." Facebook has taken down the offensive poll and disabled the third-party application that was used to create it. Barry Schnitt, Facebook's spokesman for policy, also told ThinkProgress that the company was following up with the developer to make sure that the application has "better procedures in place going forward to monitor their user-generated content."

Tagged as: obama, facebook, death threats, gotta laff, darrin blackford

Amanda Terkel is Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Deputy Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.