While it’s become fashionable to dump on the aging social media platform Facebook, I quite enjoy using it. Many of my high school and college friends use it to celebrate birthdays and share news of their children and their travels. Eight years ago, I reconnected with a college housemate on the platform, and last year we got married. Thanks, Facebook.
But like many people, I wish I had more control over how Facebook delivers my friends’ updates to me. Facebook’s inscrutable feed algorithm, which is supposed to calculate which content is most likely to appeal to me and then send it my way, forgets friends I want to hear from, becomes obsessed with people to whom I’m only loosely connected and generally feels like an obstacle to how I’d like to connect with my friends.
When the British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software workaround to address this problem, I was intrigued. Mr. Barclay’s tool — a piece of software known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser — was simple. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook’s algorithm generates. I could curate my feed by following only those friends and groups I really still want to see updates from.
As nice as this tool would be for me, I saw in it a bigger purpose: If tools like Unfollow Everything were allowed to flourish, and we could have better control over what we see on social media, these tools might create a more civic-minded internet.
There are many serious concerns about what social media is doing to us individually, and to society. Congress has passed or proposed sweeping measures, from forcing a sale of TikTok to asking platforms to ensure young users aren’t harmed by the content they experience online. These broad measures do violence to freedom of expression, and they may put even more control over what we read and view in the hands of these powerful companies. If a court finds that users have a right to choose what they experience on social media, a new path forward is possible: We can decide how social media works for us and for our children through tools we can control.
Unfortunately, Mr. Barclay was forced by Facebook to remove the software. Large social media platforms appear to be increasingly resistant to third-party tools that give users more command over their experiences. Many of them, in fact, have stopped supporting third-party tools directly.
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