Facebook Deletes Social Fixer Community Page Without Explanation 192
A new submitter writes "Matt Kruse, author of the Social Fixer for Facebook browser extension, warns users of the dangers of building a community on a platform that can and will shut you down on a whim: 'It's gone. Years of work and almost 340,000 fans, wiped out. Erased. I have never been given any details about what "community standards" I was apparently violating (because I wasn't). This is a case of Facebook choosing to shut down someone's business just because they want to, not because they were doing anything wrong. This is extremely frustrating and disappointing to me, and should be to others as well.' The administrators and moderators of his Page found that their personal Facebook accounts have been silenced for 12 hours, as well." I've recently installed Social Fixer, and find it tremendously useful; this news just inspired me to donate a few bucks to Kruse — cheaper than what Mark Zuckerberg would like to hear my complaint.
It's pretty simple actually - Do Some Evil. (Score:5, Interesting)
Horrible social media site does horrible things. (Score:4, Interesting)
(On a more serious note, the same thing happened to the extension FB Purity [fbpurity.com].
Simple Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
He writes an application that runs on top of your browser when it's looking at facebook. why not throw in some code to re-imagine his fan page the way it was before? This could serve as the start of a way to wean users from facebook altogether, give them a little real content mixed with more open data (like a social media aggregator) and eventually replace the entire facebook experience with an aggregated one that can share/source on any platform. that way, when one provider does something silly (or vengeful, whatever) the app just routes around it.
Re:Warning: Cynicism Inside: (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you look at anything in the links? At all?
Social Fixer does not have a business model of "telling people not to trust" Facebook. It's an addon/extension that lets you tweak UI elements of Facebook. Your whole comment is irrelevant.
The entire story is irrelevant.
Summary: Guy makes extension which alters FB page rendering, which is a violation of their TOS. He gets ignored while makers of other extensions which do similar things get shut down. FB finally shuts him down, tells him why. Dipshit Slashdot poster creates article with bullshit headline and summary which lacks details, Dice quickly promotes to front page to generate clicks.
Re:Not Surprising at all! (Score:5, Interesting)
>This is why every single user should delete their FB account.
And go where, Yahoo, G+, Geocities?
Even Usenet is harvested 100 different ways to Sunday.
All these posts in this thread saying "stop interacting with big business." Have y'all looked around? Try doing that without becoming a hermit living in the woods. The battle has been lost, folks.
"B...but Diaspora!" Diaspora is slow and to really take advantage of it, you have to run your own server, which means that 99 percent of users can't even wrap their heads around the concept.
>NSA
They're in the NOCs. Good luck with that.
--
BMO
Why most of you are getting this wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
As somebody familiar with both Matt Kruse and Social Fixer over the last several years, allow me to clarify just what the real issue is here.
What makes this frustrating is that the Social Fixer page, and the suspensions of the personal accounts of Matt, his wife, and all of the page administrators, is that none of them had any means of communication with anybody from Facebook about it. There ONLY option was to click an "Appeal" button. They couldn't ask exactly what they did wrong, they couldn't ask how they could make things better. It was an entirely unilateral decision made by somebody within Facebook that completely blocks the communication that social media is supposed to help foster.
Matt is not clueless about how Facebook operates. After all, at one time, somebody within Facebook was actually recruiting him. What is even more bewildering is that this could happen in spite of the fact that SOMEBODY ELSE within Facebook knows of the work Matt does and found him to be favorable enough to even offer a job. So, now Matt is only left to wonder, did this removal of his community page happen because Facebook is cold and mechanical, or did this happen because somebody within Facebook has an axe to grind with him personally?
To me it's not astonishing that this happened, it's astonishing as to HOW it could happen.
Re:Warning: Cynicism Inside: (Score:4, Interesting)