Researcher’s ‘unfollow everything’ lawsuit against Meta gets dismissed

[Pelican Press 0]

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Researcher’s ‘unfollow everything’ lawsuit against Meta gets dismissed

A lawsuit from a researcher who tried to develop a browser extension for

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called “Unfollow Everything 2.0″ has been dismissed for now,

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reported. Ethan Zuckerman from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University attempted to use the Section 230 tech shield law in a novel way to force Meta to allow him to develop the tool that would wipe a

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user’s feed clean.

For background, Zuckerman was inspired by a 2021 project called “

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” that would have allowed people to use

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without the News Feed, or curate it to only show posts from specific people. However,

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sued the *** man who created that extension and permanently disabled his account.

To avoid a similar fate, Zuckerman turned to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. While that’s mostly designed as a shield to protect tech platforms from ******** user activity, there’s a separate clause protecting developers of third-party tools “that allow people to… block content they consider objectionable.” He asked the court to recognize that clause and allow him to create the Unfollow Everything 2.0 browser extension without repercussions from Meta.

However, the court granted Meta’s filing to dismiss the lawsuit, adding that the researcher could file it at a later date. “We’re disappointed the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the court resolves the case,” Zuckerman’s lawyer said. “We continue to believe that Section 230 protects user-empowering tools, and look forward to the court considering that argument at a later time.” A Meta spokesperson said the lawsuit was “baseless.”

Meta has shut down researchers before, disabling the

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accounts of an NYU team trying to study political ad targeting in 2021. Conversely, in 2022 Meta helped itself to 48 million science papers to train an

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, which was shut down after just two days for spewing misinformation.

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#Researchers #unfollow #lawsuit #Meta #dismissed

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