Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s troubles may increase once again. Another lawsuit has been filed against Facebook’s parent company. This lawsuit on Meta is regarding Facebook feed control. This lawsuit against Meta has been filed by The Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University, America. In its complaint, the institute said that the internet company does not give the users the freedom to use third party tools to control their feeds. If a user wants that no content should be visible in their Facebook feed, then the company is taking away this freedom from them.
Due to this a lawsuit was filed
This lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company has been filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor and researcher who developed the Unfollow Everything 2.0 browser extension. This browser extension developed by a professor gives the user the freedom to unfollow all the content on Facebook at once, so that they do not see anything in the Facebook feed. The content visible in Facebook’s feed works on the company’s algorithm. This tool blocks the content fed by this algorithm.
User has no control over feed
As soon as a common Facebook user creates an account, he starts seeing many types of posts, photos, videos and pages in his feed. All this happens because of Facebook’s algorithm. Users are not able to control this feed themselves. The tool developed by the professor gives users the freedom to control the content that appears on their feed, so that they do not get addicted to scrolling through Facebook.
Earlier in 2021, a UK developer Louis Barclay had developed a similar tool Unfollow Everything, which was taken down by Facebook in 2021 due to intimidation. Also, the developer was banned from Facebook for life. This lawsuit filed by the professor is a counter, so that in future no action is taken by Meta regarding their browser extensions. The professor who filed this case told in an interview that as a user we get very little control over Facebook.
The professor said that a common user does not even know how Facebook controls us. At present, no comment has been made by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company Meta regarding this lawsuit.