Facebook doesn’t ‘like’ this, obviously
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Scrolling Facebook — deemed a time-sucking addictive for many people — could be a thing of the past if one could just “unfollow everything.” Oh, life could be a dream without that endless stream of posts, photos and videos that keep us scrolling.
(Record scratch.)
Facebook, which makes money off this never-ending seemingly dark hobby in the form of advertising dollars, isn’t having it, according to media reports on a lawsuit filed Wednesday that would call on the social media empire to give Facebookers the chance to clear their newsfeeds.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday against Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., argues that federal law allows people to use external tools to take control of their feed, the Associated Press reported.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed 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, leaving Facebookers to venture to people’s pages themselves if they want to check up on “friends.” The tool, called Unfollow Everything 2.0, is a browser extension that would essentially empty the newsfeed, giving people back hours of lost time.
The idea is that without this constant, addicting stream of content, people might use it less, which is what happened when the developer of the original Unfollow Everything, released in 2021, faced a cease-and-desist letter from what was then Facebook Inc. and a lifetime ban from the platform.
