If he is successful, he will launch “Unfollow Everything 2.0,” a browser extension.
The News Feed algorithm that Facebook uses has been in the focus of arguments for a long time over some of the most significant issues that Meta faces. Additionally, it has been a source of complaints from customers that has been nearly constant. But if a case that was just recently filed is successful, users of Facebook could be able to access the social network with a feed that is very different from what they are used to. A researcher who wants to release a browser extension that would allow individuals to “effectively turn off” their algorithmic feeds is the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The researcher in question wants to release the extension.
Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the one who came up with the extension. He contends that Facebook users would have a greater degree of control over their feeds if they were given more options. “The tool, which would be called Unfollow Everything 2.0, would enable users to unfollow their friends, groups, and pages, and by doing so, they would be able to effectively turn off their newsfeed, which is the endless scroll of posts that users see when they log into Facebook,” the complaint continues. “Users who download the tool would be free to use the platform without the feed, or they could curate the feed by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts they really want to see,” the application says. (In 2022, Meta made the decision to formally rebrand the News Feed as the “Feed”).
As far as we know, Zuckerman is not the first person to think of such a tool. He was motivated by a project from 2021 that was extremely similar to his own and was similarly called “Unfollow Everything.” Facebook filed a lawsuit against the individual from the United Kingdom who was responsible for creating the extension and permanently deleted his account. Through the use of his lawsuit, Zuckerman is attempting to avert a similar outcome. The lawsuit, which was submitted to the federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, requests that the court “recognize that Section 230 protects the development of tools designed to empower people to better control their experiences on social media.”
The case has the potential to be a new test of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is mostly recognized as the statute that protects internet platforms from being held legally liable for the behavior of its users. The lawsuit brought by Zuckerman, on the other hand, “relies on a separate provision protecting the developers of third-party tools that allow people to curate what they see online, including by blocking content that they consider objectionable.” This is in contrast to other cases brought before the Supreme Court that include the legislation at issue.
Regarding the case, a spokeswoman for Meta declined to comment on the matter. When it comes to independent researchers, the firm has a long history of employing practices that are quite predatory. During the year 2021, the business not only terminated the older version of “Unfollow Everything,” but it also blocked the Facebook accounts of a group of academics from New York University who were seeking to investigate the targeting of political advertisements. The use of these kinds of strategies has encouraged some academics to pursue initiatives known as “data donation,” which are designed to attract volunteers to “donate” their own browsing data for the purpose of supporting academic research.
Users would be able to opt in to sharing “anonymized data about their Facebook usage” if Zuckerman’s browser extension were to be deployed. Additionally, the plugin would have a data donation component. After then, the data would be put to use for study into the impacts of the algorithm that Facebook uses for its feed.