A trial filed Wednesday v Meta argues that US law requires the company to allow people to use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.
It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has clashed with researchers and developers over tools that give users additional privacy options or collect research data. This could pave the way for researchers to release add-ons that facilitate research into how social platform algorithms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.
The suit was filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. It attempts to take a federal law that has generally protected social media and use it as a tool to force transparency.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to escape legal liability for content on their platforms. Zuckerman’s suit argues that one of its subsections gives users the right to control how they access the Internet and the tools they use to do so.
“Section 230(c)(2)(b) is pretty explicit about the ability of libraries, parents, and others to control obscene or other unwanted content on the Internet,” Zuckerman explains. “I actually think it involves having control of a social network like Facebook, having that ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’
Zuckerman’s lawsuit aims to stop Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook that he is working on, called Unfollow Everything 2.0. This would allow users to easily “unfollow” their friends, groups, and pages on the service, meaning their updates no longer appear in the user’s News Feed.
Zuckerman says this would give users the power to effectively tune or turn off Facebook’s engagement-focused feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.
There is good reason to believe that Meta could make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after its release. He says he won’t launch it without a decision on his trial. In 2020, the company argued that the Friendly browser, which allowed users to search and rearrange their Facebook news feeds as well as block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta banned permanently Louis Barclaya British developer who created a tool called Unfollow Everything, after which Zuckerman’s add-on is named.
“I still remember the feeling of not following anything for the first time. It was almost miraculous. “I hadn’t lost anything, as I could still see my friends and favorite bands by going straight there,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had acquired astonishing control. I was no longer tempted to scroll through an endless stream of content. The time I spent on Facebook has decreased significantly.
