“Unfollow Everything” is a correct description of what the app/script Louis Barclay created for Facebook users.
Legal experts unsure of the outcome
The advantage is that you completely clean up the news feed, without losing any friends, and in that way the algorithm cannot serve an endless stream of content that you have not necessarily logged in to see.
“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was almost miraculous. I hadn’t lost anything, as I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going directly to them. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an endless amount of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically,” Barclay explains to Wired.
Barclay was satisfied, but it was not Meta who reacted by banning the expansion. Now University of Massachusetts–Amherst associate professor Ethan Zuckerman has gone to court to make Meta’s practice illegal – if the court rules in favor, legal experts disagree. The company, for its part, defends it by saying that the app violates the terms of use. There are similar modifications to YouTube, among others, and on X the user can see content only from the followers, but the standard display of the news feed is algorithm-based.
