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If you’ve ever wanted to experience Facebook without the News Feed, it’s a tedious task. Researcher Ethan Zuckerman wants to change that with a browser extension called Unfollow Everything 2.0, and he’s suing Facebook for the right to do so.His tool lets Facebook users quickly unfollow people, groups, and pages; it effectively turns the News Feed off and allows users to start from scratch.In addition, people can share their data with Zuckerman, the director of Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, so he can study the effect that having more control over social feeds affects user behavior and general well-being. “I’m suing Facebook to make it better. The major social media companies have too much control over what content their users see and don’t see,” Zuckerman says. “We’re bringing this lawsuit to give people more control over their social media experience and data and to expand knowledge about how platforms shape public discourse.”Zuckerman hasn’t actually launched his tool “out of fear that Meta will sue him,” according to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of Zuckerman. The lawsuit points to a similar extension that did launch: Unfollow Everything from UK-based developer Louis Barclay, who planned to work with the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland on a research study about the Facebook News Feed. After Meta sent Barclay a cease and desist in 2021, however, he removed the extension to avoid a legal fight. According to Meta, the extension “violate[d] Facebook’s terms” by automat[ing] actions on Facebook, including mass following and unfollowing of Friends, Pages, and Groups.”Zuckerman and the Knight Institute argue that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “protects the development of tools designed to empower people to better control their social media experiences.” Specifically, it protects “the developers of third-party tools that allow people to curate what they see online, including by blocking content they consider objectionable.”
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Facebook has tangled with other researchers. In 2021, it disabled the accounts of New York University researchers studying political advertisements on the social network. Facebook said the move was necessary to remain in compliance with a 2019 FTC order put in place following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, the FTC said it was inappropriate for Facebook to invoke the 2019 deal in banning the NYU researchers.Meta likely wants to avoid another Cambridge Analytica-level headache. In that case, a personality test app improperly scraped account info and exposed the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users. The FTC later hit the company with a $5 billion fine.
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