A lawsuit that would conceivably let billions of Facebook users unfollow friends, groups and pages in one fell swoop has pitted the social-networking giant’s owner, Meta Platforms Inc., against a public policy professor.
The battle lines in Ethan Zuckerman’s attempt to resurrect a browser extension called Unfollow Everything 2.0 threatens to upend the service by effectively shuttering its newsfeed.
“Users who download the tool would be free to use the platform without the feed, or to curate the feed by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts they really want to see,” according to Zuckerman’s lawsuit in May, which is based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that gives users control over how they access the internet.
“Through this provision, Congress intended to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see,” the suit said.
Software at the core of Unfollow Everything was created by Louis Barclay in 2020 to limit his time spent on Facebook, leading Meta to fire off a cease-and-desist letter to Barclay. Meta claimed Barclay breached Facebook’s terms of service by “impairing the intended operation of Facebook.”
Barclay reluctantly removed the browser extension, a move he later called “anti-consumer.”
Facebook lets users manually unfollow friends, groups and pages one at a time. Meta filed a motion to dismiss the suit in federal court in Northern California.
“This suit is baseless, and was filed over a hypothetical browser extension that has not even been built,” Meta said.
