{"id":137361,"date":"2021-10-09T06:26:33","date_gmt":"2021-10-09T05:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techweekmag.com\/?p=137361"},"modified":"2023-06-22T08:18:03","modified_gmt":"2023-06-22T07:18:03","slug":"facebook-has-banned-a-developer-who-made-an-extension-to-unfollow-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/technology\/facebook-has-banned-a-developer-who-made-an-extension-to-unfollow-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook has banned a developer who made an extension to unfollow everything"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Louis Barclay, a British browser extension developer,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/technology\/2021\/10\/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">was banned<\/a>\u00a0from Facebook after he created the Unfollow Everything tool.\u00a0This Chrome extension allows you to clear your social network news feed in one click.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I still remember the feeling when I first unsubscribed from everything.\u00a0It was wonderful.\u00a0I didn&#8217;t lose anything as I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly.\u00a0But I got a mind-boggling amount of control.\u00a0That night, my addiction to Facebook became manageable, &#8211; said the developer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>According to Slate Magazine, Unfollow Everything was published on the Chrome Store last year, but after a while Facebook\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/louisbarclay\/status\/1446111177499500559\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">demanded<\/a>\u00a0that Barclay remove it.\u00a0But despite the fact that he complied with the requirement due to his reluctance to get a lawsuit, the company permanently blocked Louis&#8217; Facebook and Instagram accounts.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">In case you were wondering, this is what an extremely aggressive cease-and-desist letter from Facebook looks like:<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/MEjVbdoqe8\">https:\/\/t.co\/MEjVbdoqe8<\/a><\/p>\n<p>My favourite part is where they demand that I give them a list of every single domain I own<\/p>\n<p>Um, why?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Louis Barclay (@louisbarclay) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/louisbarclay\/status\/1446111177499500559?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">October 7, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Louis noted that after publishing the extension, he received a lot of positive user feedback.\u00a0Moreover, the University of Neuch\u00e2tel in Switzerland offered him cooperation in studying the impact of social networks on people&#8217;s lives.<\/p>\n<p>According to the developer, his tool threatened the company&#8217;s profit, as the news feed makes users hang out longer on the social network and view more ads.\u00a0At the same time, Barclay called Facebook&#8217;s behavior &#8220;not just anti-competitive, but anti-consumer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Previously, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen\u00a0said the\u00a0company&#8217;s products harm children, incite discord and threaten democracy.\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg decided to deny these accusations:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Louis Barclay, a British browser extension developer,\u00a0was banned\u00a0from Facebook after he created the Unfollow Everything tool.\u00a0This Chrome extension allows you to clear your social network news feed in one click. I still remember the feeling when I first unsubscribed from everything.\u00a0It was wonderful.\u00a0I didn&#8217;t lose anything as I could still see my favorite friends and [&hellip;] <a class=\"g1-link g1-link-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/technology\/facebook-has-banned-a-developer-who-made-an-extension-to-unfollow-everything\/\">More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10404,"featured_media":137362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[805],"tags":[779],"class_list":{"0":"post-137361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-news"},"acf":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}