VGRC

Social networking has done a lot for us these days. We can more and more easily converse with distant friends, find new friends based on similar interests, or find new enemies to harass based on opposing interests. And no one website has proved itself more valuable to catering to people with a wide range of interests than Facebook.

The fan page feature is one of the more interesting areas of the social networking behemoth. Not only can you become a "fan" of your favorite things, but for journalistic types such as myself, it becomes an invaluable tool for instant polling results of your average internet populace. People of all ages and demographics are using the site, so you can easily cross-compare the popularity of various interests. I'll admit right now that it is far from the most accurate source of opinion data, but more times than not, it provides a decent snapshot. (Or, at least some very interesting numbers.)

So we decided to scour the Facebook fan pages to determine the popularity of amendments to the Bill of Rights, that lovely piece of paper that us Americans like to flaunt so proudly over other countries. But how exactly do we feel about the so-called "rights" the Bill of Rights provides? To Facebook!

By far, the most popular Amendment was the Second Amendment, which grants the right to bear arms. To this end, we also decided to look up the popularity of guns in general:

With both guns and the Second Amendment having near equal footing at the top of the list, we can only assume that the Second Amendment is quite popular among the Facebook Constituency. Lets continue!

Coming in second was the Fourth Amendment, that protects the citizenry from unreasonable search and seizure. For comparison's sake, I looked up various permutations of the term "Patriot Act" and found zero fans of it, which let me breathe a sigh of relief.

Showing surprisingly strong was the Tenth Amendment. You know, that catch-all amendment that was tossed at the end for all the "rights" which were never mentioned at all. Seriously, I almost forgot it existed. Nearly eleven thousand people on Facebook, however, have not. Way to pick up the slack!

Showing even more surprisingly was the First Amendment, at a far fourth place in terms of popularity. I thought this one had to be a joke, and maybe we were querying Facebook's array of data wrong. So we plugged in "Free Speech" and got a measly 3 thousand more fans.

While some minor discrepancies are to be expected on a medium such as Facebook, a ratio of 7 Second Amendment fans for every 1 First Amendment fan was almost startling. In terms of popularity, people like the right to have guns more than having the right to say they should have the right to have guns. Quite interesting!

Coming in at very distant 5th, 6th and 7th places were the Third, Ninth and Eighth Amendments. Even combined, they carry no weight in the Facebook Constituency, which is more than we could say for the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments, who had zero showing at all. Even terms like "fair trial," "due process," "trial by jury" and "speedy trial" brought up nothing.

As no sociologic analysis is complete without a control group, we checked the popularity of the actual Bill of Rights:

The complete Bill of Rights, interestingly enough, is actually less popular than the Second Amendment with the Facebook constituency, being beaten out by almost a 2-to-1 ratio, and barely matching the strength of the Fourth Amendment. What this signifies, we don't know. For that, we'll let you decide.

What we do know, however, is that there is one thing that people find more precious than their declaration of rights, and that is their favorite reality talent contest show on television: