“I still remember the feeling of not following anything for the first time. It was almost miraculous. “I hadn’t lost anything, as I could still see my friends and favorite bands by going straight there,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had acquired astonishing control. I was no longer tempted to scroll through an endless stream of content. The time I spent on Facebook has decreased significantly.
That same year, Meta launched from its platform researchers at New York University who had created a tool to monitor the political ads people saw on Facebook. Zuckerman is adding a feature to Unfollow Everything 2.0 that lets people donate data from their use of the tool to his research project. It hopes to use the data to determine whether users of its add-on who clean up their feeds end up, like Barclay, using Facebook less.
Sophia Cope, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says key parts of Section 230 related to platforms’ liability for user-posted content have been clarified through potentially thousands of cases. But few have specifically addressed the part of the law that Zuckerman’s suit seeks to exploit.
“There isn’t a lot of case law on this section of the law, so it will be interesting to see how a judge analyzes it,” Cope says. Zuckerman is a member of the EFF advisory board.
John Morris, director of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes open development of the Internet, says that to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “has never been used before, in terms of its use of article 230 to grant positive rights to users. ” noting that a judge would likely take this assertion seriously.
Meta has previously suggested that allowing add-ons that change how people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, says Zuckerman’s tool might be able to fairly repel such an accusation. “The main problem with tools that give users more control over content moderation on existing platforms is often related to privacy,” she says. “But if it’s just unfollowing specified accounts, I wouldn’t expect this issue to arise here.”
Even if a tool like Unfollow Everything 2.0 didn’t compromise users’ privacy, Meta could still argue that it violates the company’s terms of service, as it did in Barclay’s case.
“Given Meta’s history, I could understand why he would want a preemptive judgment,” Cope says. “He would be immune from any civil action brought against him by Meta.”
And while Zuckerman says he wouldn’t be surprised if it takes years for his case to reach court, he believes it’s important. “This seems like a particularly compelling case at a time when people are really concerned about the power of algorithms,” he says.
