A lawsuit filed against Meta on Wednesday argues that the company is required by U.S. law 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. It could pave the way for researchers to release add-ons that support research into how the algorithms on social platforms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.
The lawsuit was filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. An attempt is being made to use a federal law that has generally shielded social networks as a tool to enforce 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 lawsuit argues that one of the subsections gives users the right to control how they access the Internet and what tools they use to do so.
“Section 230(c)(2)(b) specifically addresses the need for libraries, parents, and others to control obscene or other objectionable content on the Internet,” Zuckerman says. “I actually think that it requires control over a social network like Facebook and the ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to exclude ourselves from the algorithm.'”
Zuckerman’s lawsuit aims to stop Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook he is working on called Unfollow Everything 2.0. It would allow users to easily “unfollow” friends, groups and pages on the service, meaning updates from them would no longer appear in the user’s news feed.
Zuckerman says this would give users the ability to optimize or effectively disable Facebook’s engagement-focused feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.
There are good reasons to believe that Meta could make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after its release. He says he won’t initiate it without a decision on his lawsuit. In 2020, the company argued that the Friendly browser, which allowed users to search and reorder their Facebook news feeds and block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta permanently banned Louis Barclay, a 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 everything for the first time. It was almost a miracle. “I had lost nothing as I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going directly to them,” Barclay wrote for slate by the time. “But I had gained a surprising amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down through a never-ending feed of content. The amount of time I spent on Facebook has dropped dramatically.”