internet social-media advertisements
Does Fluff Busting Purity violate Facebook&#39;s terms of service?
<p>I'm getting annoyed by Facebook reels, sponsored posts, and other elements on Facebook, desiring a means to control them. The most powerful way to control what content appears on Facebook appears to be the Fluff Busting Purity extension. It's an extension designed to customize the appearance of Facebook by removing certain elements, such as reels or sponsored posts. However, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">according to Wikipedia</a>, Facebook (not surprisingly) hasn't taken too kindly to it in the past, banning the creator in 2012. Wikipedia cites <a href="https://thenextweb.com/news/facebook-bans-creator-of-fb-purity-a-browser-add-on-that-lets-users-customize-the-site" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><em>The Next Web</em></a> as a source, which brings up section 3.11 of the Facebook terms as the likely text at issue:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>The Next Web</em> also adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the surface, it seems Facebook is well within its rights to shut down the user’s account for violating its ToS, but the developer of the extension / script has a point when he – or she – says a browser add-on does not require an API key or license to access Facebook’s services by design.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the creator of the extension may have been banned, I discovered that the page for the app itself is alive and well:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity</a></p>
<p>Would I be violating Facebook's terms if I used F.B. Purity?</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong></p>
<p>Here is the developer's response: <a href="https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-team-have-told-me-i-am-banned-from-facebook-because-of-f-b-purity/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-team-have-told-me-i-am-banned-from-facebook-because-of-f-b-purity/</a></p>

<p>It is not obvious that it violates the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TOS</a> (which is a complex wall of text and links to chase). §3 states that &quot;we need you to make the following commitments&quot;, followed by some subsections – you can re-interpret this as an agreement on your part to do this stuff. Those subsections relate to &quot;legitimate accounts and users&quot; (not relevant), &quot;what you can do&quot; (potentially relevant), &quot;permissions you give&quot; (granting them license to use your stuff), not infringing on their copyright. The second subsection about what you can &quot;do&quot; says that you can't &quot;violate these or other terms&quot;, or do anything unlawful, or infringing, nor may you upload viruses, or scrape Facebook data. So it turns out that there is nothing specific in that subsection, but it does say that you won;t violate &quot;other terms&quot;.</p>
<p>§5 presents a bunch of other possible terms and policies: Community Standards, Commercial Terms, Advertising Policies, Self-Serve Ad Terms, Facebook Pages, Groups and Events Policy, Meta Platform Terms, Developer Payment Terms, Community Payment Terms, Commerce Policies, Meta Brand Resources, Music Guidelines and Live Policies. Those primarily apply to advertisers, group-pages, developers, commercial use and content broadcast via Meta. Community Standard applies to everybody, and as you should predict there is a long list of specific sub-categories such as &quot;Violence and Criminal Behavior&quot;, &quot;Safety&quot;, &quot;Objectionable Content&quot;, &quot;Inauthenticity&quot; etc.</p>
<p>You would have to hire a lawyer to do an exhaustive search and interpretation. However, it appears that using an ad blocking app is <em>not</em> forbidden on FB, and that seems to be what that extension is. But you should read it for yourself. All. Of. It.</p>
<p>It may have violated the older TOS, but that clause seems to me missing from the present TOS.</p>
