Facebook shareholders love Peter Thiel

Apparently Facebook's shareholders didn't think much of my suggestion to kick Peter Thiel off the board of directors.

No matter what you think of Gawker - which has definitely overstepped the line of decency many times - Thiel's secretly funded set of lawsuits against the media company seem inconsistent with Mark Zuckerberg's strong defense of freedom of speech.

But at Facebook's shareholder meeting on Monday, Thiel got more votes than every other member of the board except for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, according to the company's financial filing about the meeting.

He even got more votes than COO Sheryl Sandberg, who recently defended Thiel's actions, and Zuckerberg himself.

In a question-and-answer session with shareholders, Zuckerberg once again reiterated his defense of free speech. Answering a question about Facebook being used to spread hate speech, the CEO noted, "what we're trying to work on is encouraging people around the world to use our platform to combat that type of speech because the answer to hateful speech or negative speech is more speech and positive speech...."

I agree with that.

Unfortunately, one of Facebook's board members seems to believe that the antidote to negative speech is helping to drive the organization responsible for that speech into bankruptcy.