Meta asks court to toss “half-baked” suit over Facebook feed-killing tool

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

This week, Meta asked a US district court in California to toss a lawsuit filed by a professor, Ethan Zuckerman, who fears that Meta will sue him if he releases a tool that would give Facebook users an automated way to easily remove all content from their feeds.

Zuckerman has alleged that the imminent threat of a lawsuit from Meta has prevented him from releasing Unfollow Everything 2.0, suggesting that a cease-and-desist letter sent to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything substantiates his fears.

He’s hoping the court will find that either releasing his tool would not breach Facebook’s terms of use—which prevent “accessing or collecting data from Facebook ‘using automated means'”—or that those terms conflict with public policy. Among laws that Facebook’s terms allegedly conflict with are the First Amendment, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), as well as California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) and state privacy laws.