Facebook has reportedly banned the developer of Unfollow Everything, a browser extension that allowed the social network’s users to get rid of the News Feed, from its platforms.
Unfollow Everything developer Louis Barclay revealed the ban in an Oct. 7 blog post for Future Tense. “This summer, Facebook sent me a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action,” he says. “It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services.”
Barclay says he released the first version of Unfollow Everything to the Chrome Web Store—a central repository for extensions to the Google Chrome browser—in July 2020 as a free download. Facebook users could install the extension to unfollow their friends, the Groups they had joined, and the Pages they had liked so they would have an empty News Feed.
He later collaborated with researchers at the University of Neuchâtel on a study that compared a group that cleared out their News Feed with Unfollow Everything to a control group that didn’t. This appears to be what drew Facebook’s ire, and based on similar bans the company has issued to other researchers, one would guess it’s ostensibly because of this aspect of the study:
“Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)”
Facebook has previously said that it banned New York University researchers from its platform to “protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order,” which the agency denied, and told a group researching Instagram that using a browser extension to collect data from volunteers was a violation of both European laws and its own terms of service.
These projects have a lot in common. All three used browser extensions to gather information about Facebook users—all of whom volunteered to participate and installed the extensions knowing their data would be collected—to learn more about how Facebook’s services affect people. And, of course, all three were shut down under the auspices of protecting user privacy.
There’s little these individuals and organizations can do to contest Facebook’s demands. Barclay says that because he lives in the UK he “would have been personally on the hook for Facebook’s litigation costs” if he took the company to court and lost. Facebook is a trillion-dollar company; Barclay is an individual developer who released a free browser extension. The math is simple.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.
