Professor Seeks Section 230 Shield Before Launching Tool to Limit Facebook Feed

A researcher who developed a browser extension that would allow Facebook users to “turn off their newsfeed” preemptively has sued Meta, seeking a judicial declaration that his software tool is “immunized from legal liability” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Ethan Zuckerman -- director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure and an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst -- hasn’t launched the project because Meta threatened the developer of Unfollow Everything with legal action, said Zuckerman's complaint Wednesday (3:24-cv-002596) in U.S. District Court for Northern California. Zuckerman’s Unfollow Everything 2.0 would allow Facebook users to unfollow friends, groups and pages and “effectively turn off ... the endless scroll of posts that users see when they log into Facebook,” it said.

Social media users today are “locked in to a social media ecosystem dominated by a handful of for-profit companies that make their money by selling ads,” said the complaint. The companies collect “vast amounts of data about their users” and use the information to make their platforms “engaging,” it alleged. But there's “rising public concern” that the social media business model “undermines users’ agency and harms public discourse,” and that platforms’ engagement-driven algorithms “contribute to the spread of false, extreme, or polarizing content, while also stoking division and violence offline," it said.

Many users want more control over their social media experiences, “but the companies have largely refused to give it to them,” alleged the complaint. Zuckerman believes that third-party tools like his that “operate at the explicit direction of their users can help resolve this impasse.” Such tools “enable users to tailor what they see on social media to their own preferences” and “take back control over their social media experiences,” it said.

Section 230(c)(2)(B) “immunizes from legal liability ‘a provider of software or enabling tools that filter, screen, allow, or disallow content that the provider or user considers obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable,'” the complaint said.

Unfollow Everything 2.0 “fits comfortably within this safe harbor” because by turning off their newsfeed, users can block content they don’t want to see, while staying connected to friends and family, the complaint said. Users would be free to navigate to their friends’ profiles without first being presented with a feed that Facebook has designed "to maximize user engagement,” it said.

Zuckerman plans to conduct an academic research study of how turning off Facebook’s newsfeed affects users’ experience, the complaint said. Users can use the tool without opting in to the study, it said, but those choosing to participate will “donate limited and anonymized data about their Facebook usage." The goal of the study is to better understand user behavior online “and the influence that platform design has on that behavior.”

Unfollow Everything 2.0 is modeled on the previous Unfollow Everything tool, which developer Louis Barclay took down after Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action in 2021, said the complaint. Zuckerman “is unwilling to risk being sued,” so he won’t be able to launch Unfollow Everything 2.0 until a court rules that the tool is protected by Section 230, “or that the tool does not violate” Meta’s terms of service, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, it said.