It’s Zuckerman vs Zuckerberg!

US academic and activist Ethan Zuckerman has put Meta in a tricky situation by bringing legal action against the company for not allowing him to offer a browser extension, Unfollow Everything 2.0, which lets people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.

Facebook removed the previous version of Unfollow Everything, launched in 2021, and expelled its developer, Louis Barclay, from the platform. The year before, the company threatened legal action against the Friendly Social Browser, which allowed users to search and reorder their Facebook news feeds, as well as block ads and trackers, arguing that it violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Ethan Zuckerman has developed a tool with the same name as Barclay’s but structured as a browser add-on, arguing that users should have the right to use it without being blocked or restricted. The tool would allow users to adjust or deactivate feed based on engagement generated by Facebook, something that technically they can already do, but that requires them to individually unfollow each friend, group and page of those that appear, a Sisyphean task.

Zuckerman rests his case on the well-known Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows social media companies to avoid legal responsibility for content posted by users on their platforms…