Facebook Banned the Creator of ‘Unfollow Everything’ and Sent Him a Cease and Desist Letter

A developer who created a browser extension designed to assist Facebook customers cut back their time spent on the platform says that the corporate responded by banning him and threatening to take authorized motion.

Louis Barclay says he created Unfollow Everything to assist folks get pleasure from Facebook extra, not much less. His extension, which not exists, allowed customers to robotically unfollow all people on their FB account, thus eliminating the newsfeed feature, one of many extra odious, addictive elements of the firm’s product. The feed, which permits for an limitless barrage of targeted advertising, is powered by follows, not mates, so even with out it, customers can nonetheless go to the profiles they need to and navigate the positioning like regular.

The goal of bucking the feed, Barclay says, was to permit customers to benefit from the platform in a extra balanced, focused vogue, relatively than being blindly coerced into fixed engagement by Facebook’s algorithms.

How did Facebook reward Barclay for making an attempt to make its person expertise much less poisonous? Well, first it booted him off of all of its platforms—locking him out of his Facebook and Instagram accounts. Then, it despatched him a stop and desist letter, threatening authorized motion if he didn’t shut the browser extension down. Ultimately, Barclay stated he was pressured to take action, and Unfollow Everything not exists. He lately wrote about his expertise in an op-ed for Slate, saying:

If somebody constructed a device that made Facebook much less addictive—a device that allowed customers to learn from Facebook’s optimistic options whereas limiting their publicity to its unfavourable ones—how would Facebook reply?

I do know the reply, as a result of I constructed the device, and Facebook squashed it.

Barclay implies that the difficulty actually started when he was contacted by researchers from the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, who wished to make use of his browser extension to assist research Facebook customers’ happiness ranges as they associated to the newsfeed characteristic. Barclay obliged, however not lengthy afterward the corporate reached out to him with their authorized risk, he says. Facebook accused him of breaching its phrases of service and demanded that he “never again create a tool that interacts with Facebook or its many other services in any way,” as he put it.

Facebook didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark and we’ll replace this put up once they do.

News of Barclay’s ordeal comes as Facebook suffers by what’s probably its worst PR disaster but. Beset by a current whistleblower scandal that began as a sequence of Wall Street Journal articles and has now advanced right into a full-blown Congressional brouhaha, the social media big is having one hell of a tricky time currently. To high issues off, the corporate suffered a world outage earlier this week through some huge configuration fuckup—the likes of which now seem to be taking place once more, a minimum of in sure elements of the world. The firm most likely might’ve banked some goodwill by letting Barclay off the hook however, sadly, their resolution to purge him appears fairly par for the course.