A lawsuit from a researcher who attempted to develop a browser extension for Facebook called “Unfollow Everything 2.0” has been dismissed for now, the New York Times reports. Ethan Zuckerman of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University attempted to use the Section 230 Tech Shield law in a new way, to allow Meta to develop a tool that would clean up a Facebook user’s feed.
For background, Zuckerman was inspired by a 2021 project called “Unfollow Everything,” which would have allowed people to use Facebook without a News Feed or curate it to only show posts from specific people. However, Facebook sued the UK man who created that extension and permanently disabled his account.
To avoid a similar fate, Zuckerman turned to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. While it is mostly designed as a shield to protect tech platforms from illegal user activity, there is a separate clause to protect developers of third-party tools “that allow people to block objectionable content.” He asked the court to accept that clause and allow him to create the Unfollow Everything 2.0 browser extension without any repercussions from Meta.
The court, however, granted Meta’s filing to dismiss the lawsuit, and said the researcher could file it at a later date. “We are disappointed that the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the case can be resolved,” Zuckerman’s lawyer said. “We believe Section 230 protects user-empowerment tools, and look forward to the court’s consideration of that argument at a later date.” A Meta spokesperson said the lawsuit was “baseless.”
Meta has laid off researchers before, in 2021 disabling the Facebook accounts of an NYU team trying to study political ad targeting. In contrast, in 2022 Meta helped sift through 48 million science papers to train an AI system called Galactica, which was shut down after just two days for spreading misinformation.
According to Bloomberg reporting, Meta is preparing for even more layoffs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a company memo that he plans to cut about five percent of his “low-performing employees.”
“I’ve decided to raise the standard for performance management and phase out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “We typically phase out people who fail to meet expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to make performance-based cuts throughout this cycle.”
Overall, once layoffs are taken into account, Meta could have as much as 10 percent fewer employees. Bloomberg suggested that the upcoming pink slips will focus on people “who have been with the company long enough to have received a performance rating.”