From Zuckerberg to Zuckerman, it’s a short step. A singular assonance between the creator of Facebook and the developer who could revolutionize the most famous social network in the world. Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Ethan Zuckerman sued Meta, through Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. The move is aimed at preventing Facebook from blocking a tool that the researcher himself has designed to “reset” the dictates of the algorithm and the connections that every user of the social network has established over the years, including “likes” to groups and pages.
A way to bring users back to year zero of Facebook, or rather, to give everyone full control not only over their data but also over what they see when browsing the news flow on the platform. In Europe, with the introduction of the Digital Services Act (DSA), Brussels has already forced Facebook and other digital platforms to offer, in addition to the order given by the algorithms, also a chronological order. Zuckerman’s idea is even more extreme and is aimed at restoring a primordial essence of the social experience, making subscribers see those contents that are truly popular and not just those suggested by the personalization and recommendations of artificial intelligence.
The project by researcher Ethan Zuckerman is called ‘Unfollow Everything 2.0’ and practically translates into an extension for browsers, the classic navigation programs, with which all you need to do is click a button to have a neutral view of Facebook. The conditional is mandatory because, for the publication of the instrument, it is necessary to await the opinion of the Federal Court of San Francisco, where the case was filed. In 2021, Meta had already banned Louis Barclay from Facebook, the British developer responsible for the first version of Unfollow Everything (“unfollow everything”), which Zuckerman was subsequently inspired by.
Meta argued at the time that allowing add-ons that change the way people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, reported in an interview with Wired USA that researcher Zuckerman’s tool might be able to refute such an accusation. “The main problem with these apps,” she explained, “is that they give users more control over content moderation.
But if it’s all about unfollowing certain accounts, there shouldn’t be enough security concerns to censor Unfollow Everything 2.0.” “It seems like a particularly interesting case to address at a time when people are really worried about the power of algorithms “, added Sophia Cope, lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American group that deals with digital rights, to the same newspaper.
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