Facebook users are probably aware that what they see in their news feeds is determined by the company’s recommendation algorithms. (Well, most users.) Many are accustomed to this fact, but some believe that there are alternatives to this kind of centralized control. Ethan Zuckerman is among them—and that’s why he and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia recently filed a lawsuit against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, asking a court to empower users to employ third-party tools to filter their news feeds. The suit relies on a novel interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was initially designed to protect digital platforms from legal liability for content posted by users.
Zuckerman is not just any Facebook user: He is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the school’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure; previously, he led the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Zuckerman wrote that the Facebook algorithm “forgets friends I want to hear from, becomes obsessed with people to whom I’m only loosely connected, and generally feels like an obstacle to how I’d like to connect with my friends.” But his lawsuit is about more than that, he says. If it succeeds, he argues, “we can decide how social media works for us and for our children through tools we can control,” instead of being at the mercy of The Algorithm.
Zuckerman told me this week that he got the idea for the lawsuit after Louis Barclay, a British software developer, came up with a browser extension called Unfollow Everything, which allowed users to undo some of the workings of Facebook’s algorithm. Meta blocked the extension, describing it as a breach of its terms of service, and banned Barclay from the platform permanently. The more he looked into the decision, the more Zuckerman felt that it was wrong—not only ethically, but legally. Barclay “produced something genuinely helpful,” Zuckerman said, “and I felt there should be a legal argument about whether he could do that or not.”
Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Zuckerman’s “aha moment” came while he was teaching a class about Section 230, in which he asked his students to go through the text of the law line by line. One section in particular jumped out at him, in which the law states that electronic platforms will not be held liable for “any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to” certain kinds of material. For Zuckerman—and some of the legal experts he later consulted at the Knight First Amendment Institute—this language opened the door to protect third-party software (sometimes called “middleware”) that would allow users to control their Facebook feeds based on their own criteria.
Section 230 goes on to state that one of its goals is to “encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received” by individuals using the internet. Zuckerman argues in his Times op-ed that by including these clauses, Congress clearly intended to promote the development of tools that enable users to curate their online experiences. If software such as Unfollow Everything is allowed, Zuckerman wrote, “we could have better control over what we see on social media,” which in turn might help create “a more civic-minded internet.” Giving users more control, he added, is a way to establish “more of an equilibrium in an online world that is increasingly out of kilter.” (Zuckerman wrote for CJR about building a more honest internet back in 2019.)
Zuckerman told me that he has designed a program similar to Unfollow Everything, which allows users to control their Facebook feeds and also to opt in to a research program designed by Zuckerman that will use their browsing data to study how their behavior changes when Facebook’s algorithms are removed. In addition to banning third-party software like the extension designed by Barclay, Meta has, in the past, taken similar action against researchers who have tried to use software to study what happens on Facebook: in 2021, the company not only blocked a program that Laura Edelson, a professor at New York University, and colleagues were using to study behavior on the platform, but also suspended the personal Facebook accounts of some of the researchers, as I wrote for CJR at the time.
Zuckerman’s lawsuit is essentially a gambit to preempt this type of antagonistic response. He and the Knight First Amendment Institute are asking the court to rule that software like Zuckerman’s version of Unfollow Everything is legal so that Meta can’t block it, ban Zuckerman from the platform personally, or use a law such as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to sue him for offering software that breaches their terms of service.
He concedes that it is impossible to know whether the suit will succeed or not. “I just don’t know,” he told me. “I’m pretty sure we’re right on matters of law, but obviously it could go differently once we get to court.” When he first proposed the idea, Zuckerman said that a lot of people thought he was unlikely to succeed—but that some observers have since come ‘round to his way of thinking. “This is not a stunt,” he said. “We’re planning on winning this.” If a judge denies Zuckerman a preemptive ruling protecting him from Meta’s wrath, he says that he is willing to release the software anyway and take his chances. (Meta declined to comment on Zuckerman’s suit.)
Zuckerman isn’t alone in his impression of legal viability. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, wrote that the case seemed to take much of the legal community by surprise but that several of his legal sources have come to believe that it makes some sense, after initially dismissing it as a “crazy legal theory.” Others echoed Zuckerman’s inability to predict what might happen in court. Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and author of a book on Section 230, told the Washington Post that Zuckerman’s case relies on an interpretation of the law that has yet to be tested, and said that he isn’t aware of anyone having used clauses in the law to win a preemptive declaration from a court before a case is even launched. Kosseff said that he couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how this case might end.
Sophia Cope, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, told Wired that most of Section 230 has been clarified in the courts, but that not many cases have dealt with the part of the law on which Zuckerman’s lawsuit is based. Meta has argued that third-party software such as Unfollow Everything raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told Wired that Zuckerman’s tool is unlikely to run into this problem because it simply unfollows Facebook users, an act that shouldn’t pose any privacy or security issues.
According to Masnick, Zuckerman’s case embodies a principle that some have called “adversarial interoperability,” or the idea that new online services should be allowed to interoperate with existing ones—even if the companies that run the latter haven’t explicitly allowed them to do so—provided that they serve the needs of users. If the court buys Zuckerman’s interpretation of Section 230, Masnick argues, then it could “make the open web a lot more open, while chipping away at the centralized control of the biggest tech companies.” And a win might even make up for the fact that Zuckerman was responsible for a scourge of the early internet: the popup ad.