Lawsuit against Meta asks if Facebook users have right to control their feeds using external tools

Do social media users have the right to control what they see — or don't see — on their feeds?

Do social media users have the right to control what they see — or don't see — on their feeds?

A lawsuit filed against Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is arguing that a federal law often used to shield internet companies from liability also allows people to use external tools to take control of their feed — even if that means shutting it off entirely.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Meta Platforms on behalf of an Amherst professor who wants to release a tool that enables users to unfollow all the content fed to them by Facebook’s algorithm.

The tool, called Unfollow Everything 2.0, is a browser extension that would let Facebook users unfollow friends, groups and pages and empty their newsfeed — the stream of posts, photos and videos that can keep them scrolling endlessly. The idea is that without this constant, addicting stream of content, people might use it less. If the past is any indication, Meta will not be keen on the idea.

A U.K. developer, Louis Barclay, released a similar tool, called Unfollow Everything, but he took it down in 2021, fearing a lawsuit after receiving a cease-and-desist letter and a lifetime Facebook ban from Meta, then called Facebook Inc.

With Wednesday's lawsuit, Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is trying to beat Meta to the legal punch to avoid getting sued by the social media giant over the browser extension.

“The reason it’s worth challenging Facebook on this is that right now we have very little control as users over how we use these networks," Zuckerman said in an interview. "We basically get whatever controls Facebook wants. And that’s actually pretty different from how the internet has worked historically.” Just think of email, which lets people use different email clients, or different web browsers, or anti-tracking software for people who don't want to be tracked.