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Facebook Privacy Technology

Facebook Bans Developer Behind Unfollow Everything Tool (theverge.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the of-course dept.
A developer who made a tool that let people automatically unfollow friends and groups on Facebook says he's been banned permanently from the social networking site. From a report: Louis Barclay was the creator of "Unfollow Everything," a browser extension that allowed Facebook users to essentially delete their News Feed by unfollowing all their connections at once. Facebook allows users to individually unfollow friends, groups, and pages, which removes their content from the News Feed, the algorithmically-controlled heart of Facebook. Barclay's tool automated this process, instantly wiping users' News Feed.

[...] In response, Facebook sent Barclay a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year, saying he'd violated the site's terms of service by creating software that automated user interactions. Barclay says the company then "permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts" and "demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services."
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Facebook Bans Developer Behind Unfollow Everything Tool More

Facebook Bans Developer Behind Unfollow Everything Tool

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  • Its lowkey amusing in a way (Score:5, Funny)

    by Flownez ( 589611 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:32PM (#61873003)
    Facebook kinda unfollowed unfollow everything.

    • Mod parent Funny, though I confess it took me a bit of effort to get the joke. Since I don't have a follow-on joke (as sadly usual) I'm going to poke at the topic from another direction. Mostly because I was thinking about the topic Subject this morning as a trigger for Betteridge's Law.

      Mostly I was thinking about ISNS (Imaginary SNS <> Facebook) that only discloses my personal information in a reciprocal manner. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours", as the children used to say. This ISNS would a

      • What is SNS?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        While it's tempting to look at a service and try to remake it slightly better, it seems like social networks tend to get replaced by services that are actually fairly different. TicTok and Instagram have taken over a lot of Facebook's marketshare (which is part of why Facebook bought Instagram), but they don't really provide the same service.

        Instead of trying to rebuild Facebook, think about what you actually want out of social networking and look for (or create) services that do that better, perhaps in a v

  • I imagine even non-coders could create a decent unfollow script in under a couple hours.

  • He's going to make an automated Facebook account creator.

    Just use a different name and carry on

  • Sounds about right. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PseudoThink ( 576121 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:41PM (#61873025)

    I use Facebook regularly, but long ago manually unfollowed nearly all of my Facebook friends, groups, and liked pages. It actually turned Facebook a useful social news aggregator for the remaining content that I followed (mostly groups related to my making hobbies) for me while still allowing me to post updates for my close friends and family, without being nearly as much of an addictive time sink.

    But it took me several hours of tedious clicking.

    During the process, it occurred to me that Facebook had likely intentionally made this process difficult to do, since it would be trivial to make it much easier. I thought about making a Facebook app to automate the process, but I knew that would be unlikely to last long. I thought about making a client-side script to automate it, but again, I figured there'd be repercussions. Making it easy for Facebook users to easily mass-curate their own news feed would be directly counter to Facebook's adversarial business model of addicting people into getting their social dopamine fix regularly. This just confirms it.

    • I wish someone could make an app to turn off Facebook from the internet (similar to their prolonged outage last week). That would be great.
      • > I wish someone could make an app to turn off Facebook from the internet

        I keep posting this every so often, is a hosts file a something people don't know about?

        cat /etc/hosts | grep face
        # localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
        127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
        127.0.0.1 facebook.com
        127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com
        127.0.0.1 www.login.facebook.com
        127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
        127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
        127.0.0.1 www.connect.facebook.net
        127.0.0.1 apps.facebook

      • Actually, I can see someone being a really really smart ass,
        and creating a virus that does these steps:
        does not unfriend, most people still like to chat once or twice a year.
        just unfollows and makes the news feed a worthless.

        This would be the most evil thing I can think of. because nobody will notice and people might change in behavior.

    • How do you keep Facebook from inserting "suggested stories" into your news feed? I like following my friends (they are my friends after all) but I really don't need to know about the latest pop star drama or touchdown, which Facebook seems to insist on inserting into my newsfeed uninvited. I really wish I could keep that out.

      • Re:Sounds about right. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @01:53PM (#61873285) Journal

        How do you keep Facebook from inserting "suggested stories" into your news feed?

        FB Purity [fbpurity.com] is a good one. They've had some pushback from Facebook officially, and it occasionally gets broken by changes to the site, but it's a good plugin.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mrclmn ( 590405 )
          I will second this as I have no more mod points. I like the "unfriending" / "deleted" friends alert.

          • Thirded. FBPurity is excellent.

            Fun fact, if you type "fbpurity.com" on Faceboot, it will flag it as a malware link.

            However, FBP still has a page.

            Curiously, Faceboot similarly censors links to "faceboot.com" with a malware warning. However, Facebook, Inc. owns the domain, and it just redirects to facebook.com. So, they're openly acknowledging their own site as malware.

            "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
            --Mark Zucker^H^H^H^H^HGeorge Orwell

  • [...] In response, Facebook sent Barclay a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year, saying he'd violated the site's terms of service by creating software that automated user interactions. Barclay says the company then "permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts" and "demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services."

    Since it isn't a crime to make scripts that Facebook doesn't like, I think they just destroyed any leverage they had to keep him from making more of these tools :-)

    • And then if you evades the band they can sue him under any one of a dozen unfair competition laws. He's a laws intended to protect against antitrust violations but they can easily be abused. If he has deep pockets he will eventually win the lawsuit because Facebook would be abusing the law but of course it would be a pyrrhic victory.

      Generally speaking fixing problems like this requires the federal government to step in because they're the only ones who have enough power to stand up to a major corporati

  • Break rules, expect consequences.

    • What rules? And don't point to rules created after the fact and then applied retroactively.

  • I don't ever look at my news feed. I look at the half-dozen carefully curated groups I've joined, and for that, Facebook's been very useful.
    • Just stick to groups you have an interest in or participate in on a regular basis, and ignore the rest of the digital floatsam. Am I missing things? Most likely... but the return on the investment of time spent parsing through crap algorithmically fed to me by a 'suggestion engine' doesn't feel like it's worth the time in question.

      "The Feed Is For Cattle"

  • And if he doesn't comply? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:48PM (#61873049)

    What if he doesn't comply? Do they plan to double-dare ban him? You can't kill me twice, ya know?

  • This is why giant corporations whose popularity depends on their popularity are bad. Facebook is popular because everybody is on Facebook, and everybody is on Facebook because Facebook is popular. The network effects make it nearly impossible for anyone to escape their near-monopoly long-term, and make competition challenging, if not impossible.

    And because Facebook knows that these interactions are part of what makes their service addictive, they won't allow anyone to make it easier to limit those intera

  • What I really want is to block all the shared pages. Sometimes when I click the options for a post, it lets me hide all from that page, but even then sometimes it decides to show them to me anyway. Usually it only lets me hide all from whoever posted it to that page (or my friend). Generally I only want to see what my friends actually posted, not what they shared from some meme site. FB Purity helps a lot, but isn't perfect.

  • C&D Letter is Preposterous (Score:5, Informative)

    by Archie Gremlin ( 814342 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @01:01PM (#61873095)

    You can see the cease and desist letter here. https://louisbarclay.notion.si... [notion.site]

    IANAL but this looks like a load of complete BS. They don't give any grounds for the complaint and make a load of ludicrous demands.

    One of demands looks very much like restraint of trade. You "... will not in the future offer, transfer, market, sell, or offer to sell any services related to Facebook or Instagram".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      But, but, but the freedom of the corporation to curate the use of their product in any way they see fit!!!

    • LOL I love the part at the end, after making a number of unreasonable demands, it says, "Even if you do everything we ask, we offer you nothing in exchange, and retain our right to sue you for any reason."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        You must not be familiar with people who think they've got you by the balls.

        • They don't have him by the balls, from my reading he didn't even violate the terms of service.

          So to fix it for you:

          You must not be familiar with people who want you to think they've got you by the balls.

    • I, for one, "... will not in the future offer, transfer, market, sell, or offer to sell any services related to Facebook or Instagram".
      Nor will I use any services related to Facebook or Instagram.
      I have already perma-banned myself from these sites.

      And I quite like it that way.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I've found that I do my 'posts' on twitter and LinkedIn now, and post nothing to facebook. I've stopped even reading the feed. If my friends and relatives having anything important to say, they will message me or family group. Just give it up, Facebook is a waste of energy

  • Banning (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    Isn't that just an extreme form of unfollowing everything? I'd say Barclay's unfollow tool is an unqualified success.

    I'd like to get banned from Facebook as well. But it's my understanding that one has to sign up for it first. And I just can't bring myself to do that.

    • I'd like to get banned from Facebook as well. But it's my understanding that one has to sign up for it first. And I just can't bring myself to do that.

      It would be a very interesting exercise to see if one could get their shadow profile [makeuseof.com] banned without ever signing up for a Facebook account.

  • .. they banned a person for making a computer program that does something that users can do manually anyways?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by c-A-d ( 77980 )

      They banned a person for making a computer program that allows users to do something simply and quickly, instead of arduously and slowly, that affects their ability to make money.

  • need to made for people to manage the Facebook nightmare. Better yet, stop using Facebook all together and feel so much better for doing so.
  • It seems this guy wasn't singled out. Facebook simply prohibits user-automization (unless it uses their official API). No biggie.

  • In a better world... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by endus ( 698588 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @02:18PM (#61873353)

    In a better world Facebook would say, "huh, that's interesting, I wonder what's driving that? Do we have a problem?"

    But, of course, not in this world.

    Part of what keeps people coming to facebook is that it is, unfortunately, still the best way to keep in touch with people who are far away. You get snippets that are valuable, but which you wouldn't call or email someone over. "Hey my buddy in central america went kite boarding today!"

    People stay with the platform for that reason despite the massive ration of shit that it throws at them. Facebook, of course, would love to completely eliminate that aspect of the platform. Deprioritize friend updates, randomly hide shit from people you follow, show groups and news bullshit first.

    This seems like a reaction to facebook's insanely annoying algorithm. I think facebook would do well to keep in mind how critical friend activity is to the value the platform provides.

  • Of course they did (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @02:31PM (#61873365)
    If you ever got sucked into one of those grinding games that required you to amass new friends to complete a task and ended up with 20K friends around the globe you knew this plug-in. They aren't as popular as they used to be, but I still get request from friends. Once you start trying to unfriend 10K people you start looking for a way to automate it pretty fast. I haven't done an unfriend in a while but it used to take three button presses that refreshed the screen each time. And the refresh usually took 10-15 seconds each time.

  • Maybe I'm in the minority, but ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @04:06PM (#61873611)

    I've (literally) never used Facebook, but this seems like a good thing. Like with Windows 10 Update now telling me my PC doesn't currently meet all the system requirements for Windows 11 with a little red "X" next to it. I feel like it should be a green check mark ... :-)

  • Weapon of Mass Destruction (Score:3)

    by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @05:40PM (#61873821) Journal

    Facebook probably is scared shitless of making it easier for individual people to purge Facebook, but for bonus points, imagine the following scenario:

    An automated attacker using compromised credentials of tens of thousands of people coupled with an unfollow utility like this plugin to mass delete whole networks of people off of Facebook simultaneously.

    It'd be like dropping a nuke... from orbit... you know, just to make sure...

  • We are now at a crossroads here with only two streets to go down:

    1- Keep dealing with an internet that is only going to get more user hostile, more government/corporation control freak friendly, more privacy invading, more manipulative, more everything that no sane decent person ever wanted.

    2- Start over from scratch, with a firmly enforced "Users' Bill of Rights" to prevent the aforementioned abuses.

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