Status: October 15, 2021 5:20 p.m.
Facebook presents itself as a friendly network, as an advocate of free expression – but critics are sometimes quickly blocked from their accounts. This is what happened to a British developer.
Louis Barclay was a Facebook fan. The emphasis is on “was”. The programmer from Great Britain liked the social network and spent a lot of time in it. Too much, as he himself discovered at some point – especially when he kept scrolling through the so-called news feed. This is the area on Facebook where you can read all of your friends’ newly posted entries. In an article for the online magazine “Slate”, Barclay writes:
A few years ago I realized that you don’t really need a news feed. If you don’t follow anyone – friends, groups, and Pages – your newsfeed will be empty. This is not the same as making friends. When you stop following your friends and groups, you are still connected to them and can look up their profiles if you want. However, this allows you to redesign the Facebook feed yourself by only re-following the friends and groups whose posts you really want to see.
This should enable the user to use Facebook more consciously and not read through updates for hours, which has caused a real addiction in some users.
The idea of ”unfollowing” emerged
But Barclay noticed that this “unfollowing” was tedious and time-consuming. He wanted to automate the process, and as a programmer, he came up with the idea of writing an extension for the Chrome browser called “Unfollow Everything”. This extension is free, Barclay didn’t earn a cent from it.
But it wasn’t just this program – Barclay started a cooperation with the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. The researchers wanted to find out whether users spend less time on Facebook when the news feed is missing, and how this affects the psyche.
Trademark rights and terms of use violated?
Facebook should not have been happy about that. For the company, it is extremely important that customers stay on the platform as long as possible in order to get more advertising displayed. This is how Facebook earns money. Barclay writes in the article that after a few months he received cease and desist letters:
Facebook required that I delete my program and that my Facebook account be permanently disabled – an account that I had had for more than 15 years and that was my main way of keeping in touch with family and friends around the world. These demands seemed outrageous to me. But my options were limited. I live in the UK so a lawsuit against Facebook would likely have gone to a UK court where I would have personally been responsible for Facebook’s litigation costs if I had lost. Facebook is a trillion dollar company. I couldn’t afford that risk.
Facebook’s justification: The browser extension violates Facebook’s trademark rights and terms of use.
US company puts pressure on research
Barclay and the Swiss university are not the only ones who have had to stop their research under pressure from Facebook. A project by a New York university that examined the spread of disinformation on the platform and the German non-governmental organization “AlgorithmWatch” had to stop their research.
Programmer Louis Barclay continues to develop software against digital addiction. He cured his own Facebook addiction in the most radical way, involuntarily, because he is no longer allowed to open an account there.
How Facebook rubbed off an unwelcome critic
Katharina Wilhelm, ARD Los Angeles, 10/14/2021 11:04 p.m.