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What just happened? Considering the tough few weeks Facebook has been through, the company could definitely use some good PR right now, so here’s the exact opposite: It was revealed that the social network has permanently banned the creator of a tool that automatically cancels. all connections, potentially making the social network less addicting and depressing.
Louis Barclay, creator of the Unsubscribe Everything browser extension that allows users to unsubscribe – not unsubscribe – from all of their friends, groups and pages simultaneously (rather than individually), writes that his program does not been well received by Facebook.
Unsubscribe Everything essentially gets rid of your entire News Feed, which is highlighted as an addiction factor to keep people on the service. “I still remember the feeling of not following everything for the first time. It was almost miraculous. I hadn’t lost anything, since I could still see my favorite friends and bands by going directly to them,” writes Barclay in an article for Slate. “But I had gained astonishing control. I was no longer tempted to scroll through an endless stream of content. My time on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable.”
Facebook responded to the tool by sending Barclay a letter of termination and death threatening legal action. He claimed he violated the site’s terms of service through a program that automates user interactions. The company then “permanently deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts” and “demanded that I agree never to create any tools that interact with Facebook or its other services”.
Barclay notes that the Swiss University of Neuchâtel has expressed interest in using its software to study the impact of the news feed on the time spent on Facebook and the happiness of users of the platform, which may explain why the company wished it to be deleted.
The past few weeks have been the worst for Facebook since it was rocked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. It started with leaks from internal studies that showed the social network knew how damaging Instagram is for the good. – mental being of adolescent girls. Mark Zuckerberg was then forced to deny claims he told Donald Trump that Facebook would not verify politicians’ facts in exchange for less stringent regulations. He also addressed the FTC lawsuit, one of the site’s worst outages in years, and a whistleblower testifying to U.S. Senators that Facebook prioritizes money over what’s good for the audience, which most of us already knew.
Generic credit: Alex Haney
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