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Professor sues Meta to allow release of feed-killing tool for Facebook (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The tool is nearly ready to be released, Zuckerman told Ars, but the University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor is afraid that Facebook owner Meta might threaten legal action if he goes ahead. And his fears appear well-founded. In 2021, Meta sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything, Louis Barclay, leading that developer to shut down his tool after thousands of Facebook users had eagerly downloaded it.

Zuckerman is suing Meta, asking a US district court in California to invalidate Meta's past arguments against developers like Barclay and rule that Meta would have no grounds to sue if he released his tool.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This browser extension "would allow Facebook users to automatically unfollow their friends, groups, and pages, and, in doing so, to effectively turn off their newsfeeds, which Facebook algorithmically sorts to drive user engagement," the Knight Institute said in a statement.

Interesting, I've been doing that manually for a while now (not Facebook though, I haven't opened that feed in years).

Here's an article from 2021:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Nice, it looks like you can do it manually too.

When I unfollowed everything for the first time, I did it manually. I spent hours using a Facebook-provided feature to click unfollow on each of my friends, groups, and pages.