This week in social media, people are still complaining about the Facebook Messenger app, Snapchat is battling for the right to keep its "tap to hold" video capture feature, and we saw the power and problems of Twitter (and for that matter, social media) in the Ferguson shooting and Robin Williams' death.

It's time for Social Media Saturday.

Facebook:

You're Still Not Happy About Messenger, But This Will Help

Complaints from Facebook users continued this week, as the giant social media company continues to push its users to download Facebook Messenger, as part of its "app-unpacking" strategy. Luckily there are some tricks to help minimize the impact Facebook Messenger -- in all its 30K one-star-review glory -- on your life.

There are two easy changes to make so that Facebook Messenger doesn't bug you, and so you don't actually have to use the app to see messages from the big blue social network. The first trick (via Mashable) is simply to disable Facebook Messenger's notifications. On iPhone, go into your main settings, click on notification center and then Messenger. You can tweak the notifications to be less annoying or turn them off altogether. On Android, you have to go to "App info" (which you can either get to through a long-press on the home screen or through the Android Settings > Apps sub-menu) and unclick "Show notifications."

The second trick only will likely only work for a little while until Facebook fixes whatever bug allows this to happen (via The Guardian): When Facebook's app prompts you to download and install Messenger, go ahead to the App Store or Google Play. Click "download" or "install" depending on your OS and then stop the download in process. The Facebook app will be fooled, and your messaging will continue to work as normal without Messenger.

Snapchat

Hold-to-Record Feature Fight

Snapchat has been in an intellectual property fight that could take away one feature that, ironically, nearly every other Snapchat clone now includes as standard: the hold-to-record video interface.

According to TechCrunch, the social media company is fighting with a company called Mojo Media, which filed for an almost identical patent a few weeks after Snapchat. However, Mojo argues it was the first to invent, if not file a patent for, the hold-to-record video feature, which is how patents in the U.S. are ultimately decided.

There's a lot on the line here, as the winner of the proceeding could retain the patent, and use that ownership to collect licensing fees (or sell them to, or just outright sue) all of those Snapchat clones that have popped up this year.

Twitter:

This Week, the Power and Problems of Social Media on Display

This week was very busy for social media outside of the technical aspects we explore in this column. It's been a busy week for the national conversation in general, and Twitter has been one of the busiest arenas for discussion and breaking news.

And on Twitter, we saw the power and peril social media's amplifier can give us: Fitting and touching tributes to Robin Williams flooded the network early this week, followed by a stream of images, outrage, reports and then solidarity hashtags after the police shooting of an unarmed boy in Ferguson, Missouri.

But at the same time, we saw Robin Williams' 25-year-old daughter, Zelda, announce on Tuesday she was staying off of Twitter for "a good long time" after a deluge of abusive messages and offensively altered images of her father hit her account. Twitter was criticized over its self-protection tools, like blocking, for being not enough to stem the tide of abuse that can suddenly rise up from Twitter's darkest regions.

But perhaps that's why Twitter acted quickly later in the week, when a hacktivist Anonymous account threatened -- and then followed through with the threat -- to release the name of Mike Brown's shooter if the St. Louis County PD weren't willing to do it themselves. Twitter took down the Anonymous account very soon after the hacktivist released the name... the wrong name of someone who wasn't even a police officer.  

That was a clear-cut case of shutting down a line of speech that was potentially harmful to an innocent person, but the Zelda Williams situation is harder to judge. Perhaps Twitter hasn't quite hit the right balance of allowing free speech while stopping harmful speech, but it's not like that's ever been easy. 

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