Facebook already offers many basic features to exploit and, over the years, others have been added (many of which have been criticized). Don’t we like social media as thought by the creators? Do we want to add some missing features? To improve the management of the news area, automatically hide the sponsored posts and filter the contents we can rely on Social Fixer, a browser extension able to add those features that we have always wanted on the social network and that we have never been able to activate or obtain.This plugin is free and can be installed on all major browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. In this guide we will show you what this extension adds to the classic Facebook, so you can decide in full autonomy whether to keep it or not on our system.
Download Social Fix
The extension can be downloaded for free for the most famous Web browsers for PC and Mac; here below:
- Social Fix for Google Chrome
- Social Fix for Mozilla Firefox
- Social Fix for Opera
The extension is also available as a Javascript plugin, usable on specific engines such as Tampermonkey, Violentmonkey or Greasemonkey; if we use one of these engines for Javascript extensions, we can integrate Social Fix by downloading the right script.
Social Fix functionality
After downloading the extension on our browser, we recommend reloading the Facebook page, so as to immediately see the extension to work. In this part of the guide, we will show you the main features of Social Fix.
Content filtering
Among its most popular features, we find the content filtering system, which allows you to immediately hide any post that contains news, information or images about something that we don’t want to know or that we don’t care about, in a completely automatic way. To activate the filters, click on the Wrench symbol at the top right, then go to the section Social Fix Options -> filters and click on Create a New Filter; we can filter by keyword, by hashtag or by image or video tags. In addition to custom filters, we can add some of the filters created by the authors or shared by other users, moreover useful to avoid spoilers on films or political news.
Hide sponsored content (Facebook Ads)
Facebook allows companies and pages to show personalized posts to a specific group of users (paying a certain amount for coverage and dissemination). This content will appear at the top of the Facebook news stream, ruining the navigation. To block once and for all the “sponsored content” (identified precisely with this writing), we click again on the symbol in the form of a wrench, then let’s go to the section Social Fix Options -> filters and enable the filter Hide Sponsored and Suggested Posts. In this way, all the suggested and sponsored posts will no longer be displayed along with other news from our friends and the pages we follow.
Add space when we press Enter on comments
When we comment on a post or any other content, when the button is pressed enter the message will be sent immediately, without the possibility of going to the head. Basically, Social Fixer enables the feature that allows you to add a “carriage return” every time we press Enter; in this way, we can send the message only by pressing the key Public on the input field. To activate this feature, click on the Wrench symbol at the top right, let’s get in Social Fix Options -> General and enable the items related to Fix Enter In Comments, Replies & Chat, based on the scenario or text field where we want to activate it.
Hide the posts you’ve already read
How many times have you ever seen the same post at the top of the stream, perhaps because it is highly commented or with many Likes?
With Social Fixer we can hide a post already read or seen several times simply by clicking on the checkmark at the top left of each post.
Tricks to protect the privacy and stop self-starting videos
By clicking on the gear icon and selecting Social Fix Options -> Tips, we can activate some simple tricks to make the videos less annoying (which will not start by themselves), block the sending of notifications on the direct video, hide your date of birth, make the list of friends private and restrict access to own timeline.
All these items can be activated or regulated also by Facebook settings, but having them at hand in a single-window is definitely more convenient!
Always show the most recent posts
Unfortunately, Facebook, at each page load, moves the News selector from Latest to Main news (the latter prefers to show sponsored posts or with more likes/shares).
If we always want to see the last posts published by friends or by the pages we follow, click on the symbol in the form of a wrench at the top right, let’s get to Social Fix Options -> General and we activate the voice Automatically Switch to Most Recent view of the main Newsfeed.
Hide parts of the Facebook page
If there are sections of the Facebook page that we don’t like and we want to delete them, we can do it through Social Fixer.
We click on the Wrench symbol at the top right and click on Hide / Show Parts of the Page. In this mode we will only have to click on the parts we don’t want to see in the interface (changing color from green to red), then confirm the changes by clicking Done Hiding. From now on we will no longer see the parts of the page that we don’t like!
Use the Stealth mode
How many times have we happened to accidentally press on a compromising Mi or have we added to the friends a person we were just observing? To avoid this kind of errors we can adopt the Stealth mode of Social Fixer. In this mode, every click that we make on Facebook in some sensitive points will be “canceled”, so as not to risk compromising a friendship or a relationship because of a Like too much or for the addition of a new friend or friend.
To enable Stealth mode, simply click on the wrench symbol and select the item Enable “Stealth Mode”.
Conclusions
We saw together the most interesting features that Social Fixer adds to our Facebook page; in reality, there are so many others hidden, we will only have to install the extension and discover them all.
To make Facebook even cleaner, we can also turn off Facebook Messenger notifications, as described in our guide How to disable Facebook Messenger notifications. To increase account security, we can rely on the advice shown in our guide on how to Avoid having your Facebook password stolen and your account was stolen.