A researcher has filed a lawsuit before a San Francisco Federal Court against Meta (formerly the Facebook company) for right to turn off Facebook’s ‘news feed’.
The researcher who is seeking to publish a browser plugin that would enable users to “effectively turn off” their algorithmic feeds is being represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in a lawsuit against Meta.
The suit, which was submitted on Wednesday, requests that the court acknowledge that “the development of tools designed to empower people to better control their social media experiences” is protected under Section 230.
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Ethan Zuckerman, a professor and researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, developed the extension. He makes the case that giving Facebook users more control over their feeds would be beneficial.
“The tool, called Unfollow Everything 2.0, would allow users to unfollow their friends, groups, and pages, and, in doing so, to effectively turn off their newsfeed—the endless scroll of posts that users see when they log into Facebook,” the lawsuit explains.
“Users who download the tool would be free to use the platform without the feed, or to curate the feed by re-following only those friends and groups whose posts they really want to see.” (Meta officially renamed the News Feed to “Feed” in 2022).
