Last week, web developer Louis Barclay came forward in an op-ed claiming that he was permanently banned from Facebook and its subsidiaries after he created a browser extension designed to help users use the platform less.
In an article published by Slate titled “Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less,” Barclay detailed his journey of developing a tool to help him manage his Facebook addiction, but that ultimately led to him getting banned and threatened with a lawsuit by the company.
Barclay, who is a resident of the United Kingdom, created an extension called “Unfollow Everything,” which rolled out in July 2020, to give users the ability essentially “delete” their Facebook news feed by unfollowing all their connections at once. Currently, Facebook allows users to individually unfollow friends, pages, groups, and so forth, so that those entities no longer show up in your news feed. The news feed, which is controlled by an algorithm, does not allow users to mass unfollow their connections.
In the article for Slate Barclay recounted his “miraculous” experience wiping his news feed with his extension, which has since been removed. He said it made his Facebook addiction manageable.
“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable,” Barclay wrote in his article. In July 2020, he published his extension to the Chrome Store, where people could download it for free.
After Barclay published the extension, it started taking off. A university in Switzerland even reached out to coordinate a study on the correlation between Facebook and users’ happiness utilizing the “Unfollow Everything” tool.
But, in July 2021, Facebook lawyers sent Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, claiming he’d violated the platform’s terms of service by creating software to automate user interactions. Facebook informed Barclay that he’d also been permanently banned from the site and it’s other platforms, including Instagram. The letter demanded that he never again create a tool that interacts with the platform in any way ever again.
After consulting with lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Barclay decided it was too risky to litigate with Facebook and subsequently removed the extension.
“Facebook is increasingly using its terms of service to crush not only research, but also tools that give users more control over their data and platform experience,” Barclay wrote. “Facebook’s behavior isn’t just anti-competitive; it’s anti-consumer. We are being locked into platforms by virtue of their undeniable usefulness, and then prevented from making legitimate choices over how we use them—not just through the squashing of tools like Unfollow Everything, but through the highly manipulative designs and features platforms adopt in the first place.”
Barclay continued, saying that lawmakers need to address the ways Big Tech giants like Facebook stymie “user choice.”
“Platforms shouldn’t be able to wield the threat of lawsuits and account suspensions against researchers and developers who create tools that merely empower users—but as my experience shows, they can and do. How many people will be put off making tools that serve the public as a result?” he wrote.
Going forward, Barclay said he is “still searching for other ways to help people use Facebook less.” But, overall, he is thankful that “[his] own Facebook addiction is now definitively under control.”
As we’ve covered, several lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have vocalized the need to put laws in place to regulate Big Tech. Last week, a Facebook whistleblower testified in a Senate hearing that Facebook’s products "harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy."