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: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.

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.

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: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.