Social Fixer Falls Victim To Facebook Legal Threats

rueger writes "The author of the very excellent Social Fixer browser plug-in is bowing to legal threats from Facebook and removing the core functionality that made his tool so great. I like Social Fixer a lot. It makes Facebook at least three or four times more usable. The author, Matt Kruse, says 'Any threat of legal action is a big deal. I am a one-man operation. If I were sued for whatever reason, I would find it very difficult to defend myself, even if it was without merit. I would be risking my personal life to maintain a tabbed news feed for users. As much as I'd like to be your Robin Hood, I just can't do that to my family.' Bizarrely, when he asked Facebook why they don't also threaten Ad-Block, the Facebook rep claimed to have never heard of it." Kruse has some surprisingly nice things to say about his interaction with Facebook, too. Reader Daniel Dvorkin points out this commentary at BuzzFeed which points out Twitter's similar policies.

Comments

Re:LLC

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's a great theory, which will survive about 5 seconds when an army of corporate lawyers come after you under the United States' legal system. Corporate shields are good for some things, but they are not completely judgement-proof, and the US does not have a general loser-pays policy to guard against bringing cases of questionable merit against people without the resources to defend themselves effectively.

Just another reason not to use The Face Book

[Anonymous Coward]

As if we really needed another one. What a joke of a company.

Re:Just another reason not to use The Face Book

[Dogtanian]

Well, as I said previously, the problem with Social Fixer was that they *were* giving people a reason to use Facebook by making an app that *temporarily* alleviates some of the inconvenience caused by the latter's behaviour and policies without actually forcing- or even encouraging- them to change. Then failing as soon as Facebook change things round again.

They've designed an app that automatically jumps when Facebook wants their users to jump. It fixes nothing in the long term; quite the opposite, by making it marginally more comfortable to stay with Facebook, they're hiding and drawing attention away from the fundamental issue, which is Facebook's behaviour, business model and contemptious attitude towards its users. Only they have the power to change that, and they won't. The only solution is to encourage people not to use Facebook, and Social Fixer is a hindrance in that respect.

Social Fixer might seem helpful on the surface, but it's part of the Facebook ecosystem, and part of the problem, not the solution.

The problem is our legal system?

[guanxi]

Clearly justice is denied when one party can use the threat of a lawsuit to compel another to capitulate, simply because they can't afford to defend themselves. Everyone knows it works this way. Why don't more people object?

Re:The problem is our legal system?

[girlintraining]

Why don't more people object?

For the same reason he doesn't; You learn early in life if you stand up for what you believe in, authority will make an example out of you. So you learn to fly under the radar, and cherish those precious few moments in life when you can do good without being punished.

It's youthful idealism to think people will risk their freedom, their home, their financial security, their family, to combat an injustice. Especially against a vastly better equipped adversary like a large corporation with an excessively-sized legal department and millions or billions of dollars to burn... and full access to a legal system that can take away everything you own and away from everyone you know, at the snap of a gavel.

The few people who can't give up their idealism to become "successful" (that is, capitulate to the demands of the dominant social institutions of their era) very rarely manage to achieve social change -- the Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings to the Che Guevaras, etc., in a socially acceptable fashion. The majority simply become homeless, outcast from the system, develop mental or physical illness, and die early, and generally alone. And then there's the extreme fringe that, so frustrated by an inability to accomplish anything, take themselves out of the picture in a hailstorm of bullets or fire. Terrorism can promote social change, though it's politically unpopular to say this.

But as you can see... idealism is not particularly practical, which is why few people practice it except in small doses.

Re:The problem is our legal system?

[girlintraining]

Your comment gives me a crappy black feeling deep inside my chest.

As it should. We can't claim to be living to the highest ideals of democracy as long as wealth inequity exists on the scale that it does. So long as men toil and tolerate meaningless labor, potential is being wasted. We have given a tiny fraction of the population wide freedom of choice and an affluent lifestyle, at the expense of putting the overwhelming majority into poverty. This is not sustainable, nor is it moral. But it is, nevertheless, the current state of affairs.

America has never lived up to its promise as the "land of opportunity" save for a brief period after WWII called the 'golden era'. Prior to that, there was the depression, and before that the industrial revolution... where workers would fall into the machines and lose their limbs or worse, and that was pretty much it for them. There was no health care, no government assistance. Them, and their families, were suddenly dependent entirely on the charity of others, and many perished. And today, despite our technological advances, the inequities of our society continue marching forward.

Many, if not most, of our accomplishments in the area of civil rights were due not to a sudden enlightenment of our population and embracing of democratic ideals, but the more pragmatic issue of economics.

The end to slavery; We needed more workers, and frankly, slaves just don't work that hard. They're slaves. You get more work out of people by taking off the real chains and giving them a wage. By replacing the physical and concrete with an abstract, productivity improves. They are still slaves -- they have limited options for employment and only long hours for only crumbs... but the illusion of freedom makes them work harder.

Women's lib: Women moved into the workplace because during WWII, all the men were shoved into a meat grinder and many didn't come back. Someone had to work the factories. Oh we talk about how it was a great stride forward for women's liberty and feminism... but it wasn't. Economics dictated it happen... it's just that other people took credit for it.

In fact, with only a very few exceptions, economics created the circumstances in which these movements happened, and while we pat ourselves on the back and elevate our heroes... their names and actions would not have been possible, or remembered, without the backing of money. There's a reason economics is listed under the social sciences, not the physical; Because it really is all about people. You want to understand a society -- follow the money.

The fact is, America has never been a strong cultural center for the world. We are an economic power, not a cultural one. Our diplomats are predator drones and stealth bombers... not because we're excessively militant but because military power is cheap when you have a large class of poor people. We can mobilize millions to go fight proxy wars on behalf of our economic interests -- people talk about the high cost of the wars we've had, but compared to how much money we rake in from international trade, it's chump change.

Until that changes; Until America has culture, not just money and rationalizations derived from it, you won't see very many idealists getting very far in this society. We have the same potentiality in our people as the people of any other country; But we're squandering it because right now, America's business... is business.

Makes Facebook more usable

[Danathar]

"It makes Facebook at least three or four times more usable"

You know what makes Facebook more usable? Not using Facebook.

Yes, I just burned Karma.

Re:Makes Facebook more usable

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, I just burned Karma.

Currently modded to +5.

Censorship is bad! NSA is evil! Facebook is for sheeple! Microsoft sucks! Apple sucks! Google sucks! Go Edward Snowden! Ooooh, I'm a rebel! Dancing on the edge!

Facebook is worst kind of double crossing scum

[JoeyRox]

First they create an API to help engender an ecosystem that attracts developers to improve the platform and thus bring in more users. Then after the ecosystem is established and FB goes IPO for billions they start pulling the rug from underneath the third-party developers that helped get them there. FB deserves a fate worse than MySpace.

They should sue browsers too ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

The solution to this is obviously to avoid facebook/twitter and all that shit like the plague.

Regardless, how can they sue somebody for doing a fucking greasemonkey script? "This software tinkers with our webpage" seems to be their logic. Well, so does every browser on planet earth. HTML is a declarative language, you REQUIRE a user agent to interpret your webpage. Essentially, you are telling the user "well, here is this information, and we think it should be displayed sort of like this". That's it. The user can either parse the code on his own (aka just read the source), or write some code to do it, or use somebody else's code to parse it. How are the actions performed by this script any different from what any browser does?

If you publish a website, everytime it's displayed, you are acting as GUESTS in my computer, no the other way around, and you'll play by my rules.

Re:Open Source the Tab Code

[icebike]

So he open sources the plugin, publishes it somewhere else for free.

They can't sue the totality of git-hub or Source Forge.

As long as he puts nothing on Facebook's website they can't touch him.

I'm sure there are several dozen sites in the EU that would host his project for free.
Facebook's legal department would know better than to try. Most lawyers have heard of the Streisand effect.

Re:Hate Mail to Facebook

[HiThere]

Who advertises on FaceBook? Send it to them. And tell them why.

Caution: This may not be effective. Some companies believe that any publicity is good publicity.

Re:Open Source the Tab Code

[icebike]

How could anyone capable of writing code be incapable incapable of using Google or Bing or Yandex?

Re:The first rule of AdBlock...

[greg1104]

I use Facebook and Adblock and block almost every ad they carry. Right now, that nukes the entire set from the right hand bar. Facebook knows perfectly well how many people block those easy to filter right hand side ads. It's low enough that they don't care, because they have a few ways to give you internal ads instead.

What they are doing now is putting more and more ads in the main section instead. If for example I click to "Like" a post from a group, the minute I do that it rewrites the page to add an inline "If you like that you might also like..." set of ads. These aren't blocked by Adblock because they're all internal links toward other pages on Facebook. As they get more an more infrastructure for that sort of thing, they don't have to leave their regular content to serve you an ad. That makes eliminating ads an increasingly tricky game of detection and rewriting the middle of the main page. And that's exactly the thing that Social Fixer did that Adblock doesn't try. That's why Matt Kruse is being targeted while Adblock isn't. He's the only popular source for code that can block all their ads, even the internally directed ones, and that they won't tolerate.

Case in point: x264, libavcodec, mplayer, etc.

[amaurea]

Examples of this working are x264, libavcodec and mplayer, for example. All of these probably break large numbers of patents and are quite high profile and I'm sure they are a thorn in the side for the video and audio format cartels. But they are doing just fine, and have been doing so for a long time. If they had been closed one-man projects by somebody in the USA, they life expectancy would probably be much shorter.