Those of you who have had quite enough of the incessant politically motivated posts that your friends insist on cluttering up Facebook with, day after day, may want to check out Social Fixer. It is the new name for the browser extension that was once called “Better Facebook”, and that was created by Matt Kruse.
I can immediately see how Social Fixer would be a handy little thing to add to your Facebook experience. It has custom filters that you can use to setup keywords that will be matched with any and all posts. It will automatically “take action on those posts”.
If it finds posts that match your keywords, you will see a tab appear that lets you know that there are some unwanted posts lurking. It will tell you how many of them are waiting. This allows you to ignore the political posts until you are ready to deal with them. Or, you can have Social Fixer hide those posts all together, so you never, ever, have to encounter them at all.
The Social Fixer website has an excellent “How To” that will walk you through how to set it up. Somewhere in there it suggests that you select keyword like: “Republican” “Democrat” “Romney” “Obama” and “Politic” in order to get rid of the political stuff on Facebook. Those of you who live outside of the United States can use Social Fixer to get rid of the political posts that come from your American Facebook friends from now through November.
I think it is very important to be an informed voter. I enjoy reading news articles from sources like Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, and NPR that are about politics. Personally, I find the politically related things that many people are posting on Facebook to be sorely in need of a fact-checker, and frequently mean-spirited.
The comments left on these types of posts are vitriolic and emphasize the commenter’s lack of education. It’s enough to have made me lose my faith in humanity, and is a large part of the reason that I have deleted my Facebook account.
Oddly enough, I first learned about Social Fixer a few hours before I quit Facebook, when one of my very intelligent friends posted something about it on her Facebook page. For me, it was too late. However, Social Fixer might be exactly what you need to keep your Facebook experience a pleasant one as this volatile political season continues.
It looks like they upgraded to version 7 today. After several refreshes, it appears to be a lot more stable.
Except that it is not ready for prime time. I’m not sure about other browsers, but on Safari it constantly loses the filter you set and you have to set the filter again. I’ve had to reset the filter about 5 times now in the past 3 days. That is a major annoyance. I just uninstalled it.