A court is being asked to decide whether or not Meta has a legal obligation to allow the use of Unfollow Everything – a browser tool which effectively empties your Facebook feed.
The idea behind the tool is that instead of being sucked into an effectively endless feed of posts from every friend, group, and page you have ever followed, you get to proactively choose the posts you read …
Unfollow Everything
Wired reports that the original version of the tool was created by British developer Louis Barclay. He said that unfollowing everything, but remaining friends with everyone in his feed, and staying in all his groups, meant that using Facebook became a deliberate act, rather than an endless time-suck.
I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.
Meta wasn’t happy, and permanently banned him from the app, claiming the tool breached the company’s terms of service.
Unfollow Everything 2.0
An academic researcher has developed a new version of the tool, and wants to be able to study how it impacts their Facebook usage. Do they spend less time using the app, for example, and does it increase or decrease their satisfaction with it?
But he can’t do that if Meta bans the tool, so University of Massachusetts–Amherst associate professor Ethan Zuckerman has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit asking a court to rule that this would be illegal.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to evade 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 quite explicit about libraries, parents, and others having the ability to control obscene or other unwanted content on the internet,” says Zuckerman. “I actually think that anticipates having control over a social network like Facebook, having this ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’”
Legal experts have mixed views on whether the case will succeed.
9to5Mac’s Take
Social networks started out as something designed to add value to our lives, giving us additional ways to connect with family and friends, but for many have ended up having the opposite effect – leading people to spend too much time glued to a screen, or creating curated versions of their own lives which present a misleading impression that everyone else is having a better time.
Personally, I last year made a conscious decision to significantly cut back on my own social media usage. I did a limited version of what this tool does – unfollowing a bunch of people and groups without disconnecting from them. That gave me a much shorter feed, while still allowing me to check in on particular friends or groups when I choose to.
I also made a deliberate decision not to begin using any new social networks unless and until they replaced – rather than added to – the two I already use.
For me, that’s been a very positive thing in my life. Unfollowing everything might be an extreme version of this, but I do rather like the idea of starting with a blank sheet and then adding people and groups back into my feed on a considered basis. I hope the suit succeeds, and is subsequently expanded to other social networks.
Photo by Erwann Letue on Unsplash
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