Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman, seeking to release a tool that allows users to unfollow Facebook's algorithmic feeds.
Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman, an Amherst professor, who wants to release a tool that allows users to unfollow all content fed to them by Facebook's algorithm. The tool, called Unfollow Everything 2.0, would enable users to unfollow friends, groups, and pages, effectively turning off their algorithmic feeds. A similar tool, Unfollower Everything, was previously released by a UK developer but taken down in 2021 due to concerns about legal action from Meta. The lawsuit argues that a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, grants users the right to decide what they see on the platform by enabling them to use external tools to control their feeds.