

Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix - grellas
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/facebook-takedown-followup-what-happened-and-what-facebook-needs-to-fix.ars

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protomyth
I am glad to read this part: "We plan to continue pressing Facebook on this
issue, but in the meantime, keep sending in your horror stories. We're sure
there are plenty more out there." I was very worried they would get their
stuff fixed, and ignore the issue afterwards.

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pstack
This sucks and everything, but this is just the kind of garbage you're going
to have to put up with when you put such an emphasis on using a proprietary
social networking site as your main presence online for yourself or your
organization. Now, imagine you were also using Facebook for all of your
communication (chat, messaging, forum, group, etc) needs. You'd also be out of
all of those services until and unless they restored them for you.

This is why my advice remains: Do what people have done for almost twenty
years. Make a website. Do your stuff on your website. If you have anything
worth while, people will come to your website. Stop handing the keys to the
internet over to Facebook both by using their services directly or spamming
your own site and uglifying it with Facebook Everything widgets.

Using Facebook as your web presence strikes me as about as professional and
makes you look about as serious as using Angelfire or Geocities, anyway.

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soulclap
Agree with everything you said. But besides that, Facebook is so huge right
now that you are basically forced to 'represent' on there as well.

Someone in the comments on the first Ars Technica article wrote that Facebook
took down the page for one of their websites (a wiki) and they lost loads of
visitors because of that, never recovered, closed it down.

And yes, it is 'bad' and given those events 'not smart' to rely on Facebook
for bringing in your visitors. But that's where they are at these days. And
Facebook just 'randomly' killing pages, accounts, content is just messed up.

My point is basically: you can't really avoid/ignore Facebook if you want to
get your name out there. (Sure, this might not apply to everyone but you get
it.)

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pstack
I don't think I buy the argument everyone makes about a Facebook presence
being obligatory. Are we to believe that the only way people hear of new sites
and services is through Facebook? If that's true, then how do people hear
about your Facebook page, to begin with? Or is it that they'll supposedly only
_interact_ with your site or service if it's via Facebook? You don't need a
Facebook page for people to pass your URL around or mention it in their wall
feed thing.

If the idea is that people will no longer bother going to a website or surfing
the web in general unless "facebook.com" is somewhere in the URL and/or that
they will only communicate with you via forums, wall posts, messaging on
Facebook itself and nowhere else, then . . . well, I give up. That's not a
world in which I want my service or site to exist and I'd rather not do it at
all than do it as some sort of trivial Facebook Serf on their land, by their
rules, and with their citizens. If we've come to the point that the entire
success and popularity of a service and its continued lifeblood is owed to
existing on and interacting via Facebook, then we should wave the white flag
and admit we have lost the internet.

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marcomonteiro
I completely agree with your original post. Relying entirely on Facebook is
foolish as they have complete control. On the other hand, ignoring Facebook is
also foolish. People share links, and for major news sources/outlets will
continue to do so but there's a lot of value in being present on a social
network.

I think the smart thing to do is to take precautions. Host your content and
auto-post it to Facebook, Twitter, etc. You should also have some way to
contact your users/fans directly so that if things like this happen you can
notify them.

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pstack
I can definitely see Facebook being an additional tool, the same way buying
ads on AdSense is. I just think that if one is losing all of their traffic and
community because something happened to their social networking element,
they're doing something seriously wrong. The goal of the Facebook presence
should be to funnel people into the _real_ service or community or information
on the real site and not to supplant it (and once they're on the real site,
not to have all your services like forums handled by Facebook Connect service
widgets which places you in a similar situation, too).

I'm speaking from limited experience, of course, and with a service that
established itself long before social networking even existed. I think the
premise is still sound, though.

~~~
soulclap
Getting people to visit your site/using your service regularly would be best
case, of course. But compare that to all the blogs in your feed reader, do you
visit (all of) them unless there is a new post up? Probably not.

In a similar way, a lot of people (many of them not willing to put up with
things like 'feed readers') are probably on Facebook like 'all the time' and
will only drop by and check your site if they see some activity on your
Facebook page. In other words: Facebook is like their feed reader or news
aggregator. And all of a sudden, Facebook comes along and completely removes
your feed...

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invisible
Hey look, it was DMCA! Like I said it was...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493798>

For all those people trolling around complaining, the real complaint should be
that illegal DMCA takedown requests are rarely followed up on in court. (In
other words, Ars would do society better by suing whoever made their content
get taken down.)

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joe_the_user
You mean suing a bogus email address sent by a random Internet troll? Yeah,
that's what they need to do.

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stonemetal
From what I understand you file a counter notice, then in 14 days Facebook is
on the hook.

From ChillingEffects.org _the service provider is then required to restore the
material_ Not sure how forceful required is.

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masnick
Here's an idea: Facebook should require users filing a DMCA takedown request
to have a Facebook account -- and send the requester's profile to the
person/organization the claim is against.

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TillE
That's not part of the law. If someone wants to fax or mail in a takedown
request to Facebook, they have to comply with that too.

As several people have mentioned in these topics, the only real issue is
Facebook's failure to handle counterclaims properly. That's how the DMCA is
supposed to work. You file a copyright infringement claim, the host takes down
the material. I file a counterclaim, the host puts the material back up, and
it's up to you to sue me.

If they just responded promptly to counterclaims, the hand-wringing about
bogus claims is mostly irrelevant.

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bxr
This article is all about the problems with Facebook's process, but the thing
I found most telling wasn't mentioned. Facebook issued a statement to
ReadWriteWeb before contacting Ars as to why their page was taken down or
restoring it. They prioritized saving face above dealing with the effected.

The problem isn't process, the process is a symptom of not caring about their
users.

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timdorr
I think that's just a case of one arm of the octopus (PR) being faster and
better at their job than another arm (copyright and trademark violations). It
doesn't mean the process isn't still broken, but I doubt their PR team is
hooked up to work on the copyright issues anyways.

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ignifero
I 'm happy for you ars technica and imma let you finish, but there are much
more serious issues that facebook refuses to address. For example, look at
this older post about how facebook irrationally banned adsense from their apps
and refuses to respond to developers' complaints for more than 2 months now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336>

