A University of Massachusetts Amherst professor has filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, in the hope of allowing third-party developers the right to give social media users more control over their experiences.

Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, information and communication and the director of the Digital Public Infrastructure Initiative at UMass, filed the lawsuit in May in the Northern District of California, the federal district court that has jurisdiction over Meta’s headquarters in the city of San Mateo.

Zuckerman is seeking immunity from legal liability over his plans to release a browser extension called Unfollow Everything 2.0, that would allow Facebook users to unfollow friends, groups and pages en masse, effectively avoiding the long scrolling users have become accustomed to when they open the app. Zuckerman filed the lawsuit with the assistance of lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Should the courts rule in his favor, it would prevent Meta’s lawyers from suing Zuckerman or sending a cease-and-desist letter to take down the extension, something that occurred when another developer and an acquaintance of Zuckerman, Louis Barclay, created the original Unfollow Everything app in 2020.

“They essentially ordered him [Barclay] to take things down, and if he didn’t take it down, they were going to take him to court and the agreements he signed as a UK user of Facebook meant that he would face paying all the court fees,” Zuckerman said in an interview. “This was bad behavior on Facebook’s part. There should be the ability to run any number of programs to give you more control over your Facebook experience.”

The argument for immunity for Unfollow Everything 2.0 relies on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a section that social media companies like Meta have themselves often relied on to claim they are not liable for the content that is shown on their websites. The section provides legal immunity to “a provider of software or enabling tools that filter, screen, allow, or disallow content that the provider or user considers obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Zuckerman has had experience navigating the laws around online content moderation. In the 1990s, he was part of the team that built the website tripod.com, a web-hosting service that was one of the earliest examples of hosting user-generated content on the internet. Zuckerman said the site often wrestled with how much responsibility they had over the content that their host websites contained.

“I’ve been interested in these issues for a very, very long time,” Zuckerman said. “I was there when Section 230 made the internet much, much safer for companies that were hosting user-generated content. And I was very interested in the ways in which Section 230 still has some real utility.”

The lawsuit argues that through Section 230, “Congress intended to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see.” Since Zuckerman’s extension would allow Facebook users to alter their news feed to block content they find undesirable, the protections provided by Section 230 would apply to him.

Meta and social media companies have come under increased scrutiny by the public and both parties in Congress over the proliferation of content deemed to be harmful, biased or misleading, with little being done by companies to address such material. In 2021, former Meta employee Frances Haugen testified before Congress that the company knew that users gravitated toward harmful content, and the site’s algorithms continue to prioritize such content to keep users engaged on the platform.

The lawsuit points out that despite the power that Meta’s algorithm has over determining feed content, most users don’t understand how the algorithm works and have no control over how the algorithm is determined.

“This lack of understanding deprives users of the opportunity to make informed choices about their use of social media,” the lawsuit states. “Though many large platforms claim to provide tools that empower users, these tools often fail to afford users meaningful control, and in some cases even induce users to act against their own interests. ”

The implications of the lawsuit go beyond Zuckerman’s browser extension. In recent years, Meta and other social media companies have clamped down on access to their application-program interface (API) that allows third-party developers from accessing their data. Following the takeover of social media app Twitter by Elon Musk, who renamed the app X, the API services which had previously been freely offered to developers now charge exorbitant fees and has been accused of denying access to researchers studying misinformation, causing several third-party extensions to the app to effectively cease operations.

Other browser extensions for social media have also been subject to takedowns in the past. CrowdTangle, an extension that allowed tracking of the popularity of posts and trends on the site and allowed researchers to monitor disinformation, was shut down by Meta, which then incorporated its capabilities into its own service, the Meta Content Library.

Zuckerman said that should the courts rule favorably for him, it could give other third-party developers protections and subsequently allow users to control their news feeds, and researchers like him the ability to study the impact social media has in how users consume content.

“It is a whole lot easier to build the tools we’re making with an API. We can build these tools without API, but it’s harder and more work, and we need legal protection if we’re going to do it,” he said. “That’s really what my suit is about.”

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.